In T220447#5388610, @Krinkle wrote:

In T220447#5191861, @Nthep wrote:

[..] Special:Contributions&target=newbies is [..] more convenient to access than Recent Changes.

Can you elaborate in what way Newbie Contribs is more convenient than RC? Do you think it is possible for Recent Changes to become more convenient?

The main reason the Special:Contributions feature is a problem is its performance. It is very slow to load because Contributions (unlike RC) has no time limit. You can go to page 3,000 to find older edits (in theory). The Contributions database is designed for "View history" (for a single page only) and "User contribs" (for a single user only). The Newbies query is an unlimited search for all revisions by many different users, which is hard to optimise. But, we (humans) know that it is unlikely for a new user to have made edits 10 years ago, or to have more than a million edits. But, in theory that is possible because there is no time limit on "newest 1% of users". The database does not know this :)

To make these queries fast, we need to limit it by time (e.g. 30 days), and have a more specific meaning of "new user" (e.g. registered in last N days, with upto N edits).

And... that's exactly what recent changes now does. The Recent changes database is like the Contribs database, but limited to 30 days, with fast replicas optimised for arbitrary searches by any page or user. And the "newcomer" filter in recent changes shows edits by users registered in the last N days with upto N edits. (For en.wikipedia.org, it is currently set to <= 4 days and <= 10 edits).

The proposal to remove the option “Show contributions of new accounts only” from Special:Contributions is not a good idea Special:Contributions&contribs=newbie&target=newbies is the most convenient way to check the edits of new editors and is more convenient to access than Recent Changes. If the functionality is split out into it's own function then fine but removal without replacement is unacceptable.

Seem to still be an issue. Vandalism to template:Sidebar person at 0709 on 1 January and reverted at 0723 same day still persisting on Wikipedia Android App 36 hours later. Look up George Washington on the Android app to see the result.

In T174993#3597878, @GWicke wrote:

I believe it was the pageimages designation for those articles I mentioned above. Not exactly sure what happened on wiki since the revisions have been deleted from public archives (and I don't have the permission to view it).

Yeah, I am asking for that reason as well. Basically, if this is edits exclusively in the article content itself (no transclusions or image re-uploads), then refreshLink jobs would be unlikely to contribute to propagation delays.

DJ thanks for asking for comments. I first became aware of the issue via some OTRS tickets (#2017083110022701 for example which also contains screenshots) and what I witnessed for myself was the aftermath of at least these edits https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_India&diff=prev&oldid=798119728&unhide=1 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Typhoon_Hato&type=revision&diff=798119725&oldid=798119611&unhide=1