Recent Changes Discussion

If you're old, see

See also:

InstantChanges -- a proposed renaming of RecentChanges.
WikiAsGroupMindDebate
SignificantRecentChanges is a fine title for a page about, well, significant recent changes. Discussion of the SignificantRecentChanges page idea moved to that page.

Current practice:

From time to time, move the oldest day(s) to the end of the appropriate "ChangesIn<monthName><lastTwoDigitsOfYearAsWords>" page.
Save the "ChangesIn?<Month>" page before saving RecentChanges - just in case the RecentChanges save should fail.

Please keep at least three full days (in addition to the current day) in RecentChanges.

RecentChanges need to be archived because not everyone checks Wiki every day: Some may drop in every week or two - say, on weekends, when they browse from home.

Why keep at least three full days on RecentChanges:

For all of Monday, people can see all the changes of Friday, Saturday and Sunday on RecentChanges.

When that's not enough...

People who drop in less frequently can start with RecentChanges, and switch to the "ChangesInMonth" pages, for older content. (The original objective was to preserve only three months of history.)

"Where's the rest of the history?"

See ChangesInAncientHistory, which includes WardsWiki and InternetArchive history links.

ChangesInMonth is a new (and maybe temporary) idea to keep RecentChanges a reasonable size now that ChangesInWeek? is no longer maintained (since October 2008). The idea is that a new page can be created once a month and does not have to be redone the following year. After inventing this I find I have done no such thing, merely reinvented the past - see ChangesInWeekDiscussion? where the ChangesInWeek? replaced ChangesInMonth which then (2005) had become too large to be edited. -- JohnFletcher

Quite true. And I support your efforts. The history was pretty much...

People randomly deleted old stuff from RecentChanges; sometimes from in the middle.
I moved old content to "ChangesInMonth<monthName>" pages, keeping an 11 month history, leaving only 3-5 days on RecentChanges. (I moved old content to history every day.)
When this failed, due to a large monthly change history, I changed to "ChangesInWeek?<name>", still keeping about a year's history, with nightly moves of single days to history, by hand.
Eventually I tired of this. (But I'm keeping the BarnStar!!! ;-) Fortunately, while I was offline on vacation for a few weeks, others took up the slack, so I let them keep doing it.
...until they stopped, as you describe above. I've been wondering if someone would do something about it. Thanks John!!!

-- JeffGrigg

4th August 2009 I have been following the practice of ChangesInMonth for most of a year now. I usually update about once a week and start a new file for each month. I have not had any comments on this since the flurry of discussion when I started doing it. It did occur to me to look for information on how many times the ChangesInMonth pages get accessed but I cannot find cumulative access figures for wiki pages. Maybe they don't exist. -- JohnFletcher

1st December 2009 I have continued the previous practice of providing ChangesInMonth pages. I comment if there is something unusual, such as TheGap in November 2009. I have taken the decision that next year is Ten rather than OneZero, in implementing the pages for the early part of next year. -- JohnFletcher

13th February 2010 Something or someone has reverted the changes I made on 10th February to RecentChanges but not the corresponding changes to ChangesInFebruaryTen and therefore the two are right now out of line, which I will rectify. This does not usually happen. -- JohnFletcher

There was a deletion of the whole page of RecentChanges on 12th February 2010, and I was not the one who restored it (some one else restored it before I could get to it). The damage may have been made at that time. However, it should be noted that this is the type of thing that was practiced by GV in the past, and may be what happened here. -- Seattle1
- It turns out that after sorting this out, ChangesInFebruaryTen has no entries for 11th February, which means some data was probably lost.
  - This is where I wish that there was a way to capture history from NewRecentChanges as a backup to this type of situation, as it seems to be mostly unaffected (always seems to have some errors of some type though) with that type of maliciousness.

28th April 2010 A few days ago I noticed that someone had edited ChangesInAprilTen to change the names of the person doing some deletes on 4th April and 11th April to read GrammarVandal. Now today on RecentChanges there are two deletes with the name ColinWright and an edit with the name ChuckAdams. Both of these pages come up as only on MeatballWiki, so they are presumably fakes. I am putting this matter on record here, as my aim in maintaining ChangesInMonth is to make it something of record. At the moment it is keeping a record which includes some faked activities. -- JohnFletcher

I edited the aforementioned ChangesInAprilTen to read GrammarVandal, after I'd determined that the last edit was by GrammarVandal. O.K. As I understand it, ColinWright withdrew from Wiki several years ago.

15th May 2010 RecentChanges was edited last night to revert the change I had made to move some information to ChangesInMayTen. Because QuickDiff is not working it is not easy to figure out what exactly was the sequence of events. I have repeated the deletion of 4-6 May from RecentChanges. -- JohnFletcher

15th June 2011 RecentChanges for 12th June has gone missing. Either all the pages have since been edited again, or something else happened. I cannot find any data in the history files. Something similar has happened in July 2011 - see ChangesInMonth. -- JohnFletcher

26th October 2011 I am attempting to put RecentVisitors back to where it should be. For some reason the pages in the wiki history directory for this file are not in date order. I think I have got it where it should be but I am not sure. -- JohnFletcher

It's been repeatedly deleted and restored in EditWars. Repeatedly deleting and restoring a page scrambles its history. -- DaveVoorhis

It sure does. The bit which I am not sure about is June 2011. -- JohnFletcher

(3rd December 2011 - I have created CopyOfRecentVisitors in an attempt to provide some continuity to RecentVisitors. -- JohnFletcher)

7th November 2011 On a matter linked to RecentChanges, ImplicitTopics has not been used at all for at least the three months of August, September and October 2011. I have already made the files for the rest of 2011, as well as maintaining RecentChanges for the last few years. I am proposing not to create the files for ImplicitTopics in 2012. Anyone else could do this instead. -- JohnFletcher

note: there has been a revival and the pages are there for January to March 2012 now -- JohnFletcher

Feb 2012 RecentVisitors is in such a mess I have no idea what the correct version should be. What I mean is, the version which records the entries made by visitors, so that their entry is maintained. Anything else is like tearing pages out of a visitors book. -- JohnFletcher

30th September 2012 Someone has edited RecentChanges since I moved some days to ChangesInSeptemberTwelve this morning (U.K. time). As a result recent changes from 24th September to 30th September have been deleted and I cannot find a copy as http://c2.com/wiki/history/RecentChanges/ only keeps a copy every few days. If anyone knows how to get it back please help. Some kind person has restored the missing part,. -- JohnFletcher

Historic information on "ChangesInWeek?*" pages:

The "ChangesInWeek?*" pages were created as a replacement for the "ChangesIn?<Month>" pages when monthly pages grew excessively large and unwieldy. With the volume of changes in late 2004, each of the month's changes in November and December of 2004 could not be held in a single page, regardless of browser used. WardsWiki limits page sizes as a defense against spam prevent the posting of excessively large pages -- something over 256K of text each. Also "ChangesInMonth" pages were taking a long time to render because the Wiki server has to look up all the referenced pages.

Rather than clear everything at the end of a year, would it be possible to somehow compact into changes into ChangesInTwoThousandAndFive?, say? I ask because I'd like an easy way to know approximately when certain threads started. Just a thought. -- BenA.

That would be problematic. Thread and page are not the same. Also, there is a maximum page size.

Yes; one of the reasons for going from ChangesInMonth* to ChangesInWeek* pages was that the ChangesInMonth* pages were exceeding Wiki's maximum page size -- which is much larger than the 32K limit that some browsers impose. So a ChangesInYear page would be infeasible. Plus, it would take an excessively long time to load -- as it would have to check the existence of all pages referenced in that year. -- JeffGrigg

The InternetArchive/WaybackMachine has some useful pages for what's asked for above -- WardsWiki need not provide it to historians. See ChangesInAncientHistory.

Aren't RecentChanges done automatically now? On the FindPage we find the Links:

StartingPoints of a dozen varieties
RoadMaps that introduce the largest topics
RecentVisitors who have left their names
RecentChanges recorded automatically
MoreAboutMechanics of browsing and editing on this server
TipsForBeginners from other users

Answer: RecentChanges are extended automatically whenever someone edits a page. So they automatically get longer and longer until they become difficult to manage and take too long to load. So there's a MANUAL process to move RecentChanges entries to ChangesInMonth pages. Maintenance of the ChangesInMonth pages just seems automatic because a small number of WikiGnomes have been doing it by hand for quite a few years. -- JeffGrigg

In the last change made 2 years ago by KrisJohnson added RecentChangesIsNotTheWiki. Agreed. But, how many of the frequent visitors of the wiki get by without using RecentChanges? If so, please advice.

Assuming RecentChanges is a central tool, then I would like to suggest a filtering tool on this page can help frequent visitors to home in on specific areas of interest.

Filtering examples could include some setting to filter out new pages that have been deleted, or choose only pages that have been added, or ....

Lastly I would like the edit page function for RecentChanges to be removed, if not already. --dl

With WikiAtThirtyThousand nearing, I wondered, what kind of pages these 10 new pages per week are. And I discovered that a RecentNewPages? functionality is 'missing'. What do you think? Would such a functionality be useful?

I think that it could be helpful for newbies. Al least more than (New)RecentChanges, which often requires that you have read most of it already.

-- GunnarZarncke

One problem with RecentChanges is that it is subject to vandalism (being an editable Wiki page). I've observed vandals/gnomes making bulk edits, and then deleting references to their changes from RecentChanges. (Occasionally, vandals have deleted RecentChanges altogether...)

Outsourcing manual additions to RecentChanges to its GoogleSideWiki part may help to add value without cluttering the screen-estate. Example: http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/fridemar/id/YLlh3bCH49i8WZaqGGE7N5UsAnk -- FridemarPache

2009-02-10: I simplified the header links on the RecentChanges page, and eliminated some duplicate and outdated entries. I also dropped the UserName link, as its usage is currently discouraged; see comments on that page about the GrammarVandal. -- JeffGrigg

Note that UserNames seem to be back, and some appear wrong.

Domain names are back. The incorrect UserNames are just GrammarVandal spoofing as usual.

20140103: Recent addition to recent changes:

How long will this stay if I edit it? (A random ip address) * RecentChanges . . . . . . cpe002586d9813d-cm0018c0d8d706.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com

Answer: Not very long as there are people around who care.

There seem to be some changes I haven't made being listed in RecentChanges as made by me and other changes I did make changed. --- MartinSpamer

GrammarVandal has spoofed your UserName in order to make some edits. In order to prevent this, I recommend not editing with your UserName cookie set. -- DaveVoorhis

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