Hi all
While looking for a reason our Special:ActiveUsers page and API call was being jailed to current month and not 30 days back(still wondering about it). I was told on irc ActiveUsers had been removed from current MW. Yep, last week a commit to remove the Special page, however it still looks like it is being shown as an active link on the statistics Special page.
Got a couple of questions because I don't know if thought out:
My first would be - Why? I realize it might give a limited amount of stats, but I find it useful to know who has been active on the wiki rather quickly. Larger wikis or very active wikis should drop the return in days down to keep the db from being hit too hard. e.g. Last 7 days or last 3 days, it can be set in localsettings.
Why not a flag to turn off or on the Special page? Seems it would have been simpler to take this route than start axing it out, which now looks like there are some remnants left - the aforementioned Special:Statistics page. There is still a link to the ActiveUsers page, active and errors out on mediawiki.org.
Is there a planned alternative? Last year, I think, the API in 1.19 added a way to pull active users with an API call. Will that be removed too?
Struggling to get user participation up on a wiki, statistical data helps whether it is huge sets or small sets of data. Every little bit helps. Interested in how everyone else feels about this.
Thanks! Tom
The page has been removed because it took several seconds to load on the English Wikipedia. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078 Niklas has already fixed the link, it needs to be backported to 1.21. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46719
On the "uselessness" of the special page: sure, on en.wiki it's 120k names, but e.g. on 178 Wikipedias it's a single very useful page of less than 50 names... http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/display.php?t=wp&s=ausers_asc
Nemo
On our wiki it is a very useful feature too. Removing it from the software just because it makes no sense on the en wikipedia is kind of ignorant.
Am 05.04.2013 16:49, schrieb Federico Leva (Nemo):
The page has been removed because it took several seconds to load on the English Wikipedia. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078 Niklas has already fixed the link, it needs to be backported to 1.21. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46719
On the "uselessness" of the special page: sure, on en.wiki it's 120k names, but e.g. on 178 Wikipedias it's a single very useful page of less than 50 names... http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/display.php?t=wp&s=ausers_asc
A motivated developer can take the code and create an extension out of it. There are over 1000 known extensions that add features not present in MediaWiki core for whatever reason.
Calling people or people's actions ignorant is not helpful, in my opinion, Stip, so I kindly request you to make constructive contributions.
Op 6 apr. 2013 om 14:07 heeft Stip stipen.treublatt@gmx.net het volgende geschreven:
On our wiki it is a very useful feature too. Removing it from the software just because it makes no sense on the en wikipedia is kind of ignorant.
Am 05.04.2013 16:49, schrieb Federico Leva (Nemo):
The page has been removed because it took several seconds to load on the English Wikipedia. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078 Niklas has already fixed the link, it needs to be backported to 1.21. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46719
On the "uselessness" of the special page: sure, on en.wiki it's 120k names, but e.g. on 178 Wikipedias it's a single very useful page of less than 50 names... http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/display.php?t=wp&s=ausers_asc
FWIW, I didn't remove it because it was slow on enwiki, but because the queries sucked and it doesn't scale. Just because a query is fast doesn't mean it's efficient...just means your dataset is small.
-Chad
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazeland@xs4all.nl wrote:
A motivated developer can take the code and create an extension out of it. There are over 1000 known extensions that add features not present in MediaWiki core for whatever reason.
Calling people or people's actions ignorant is not helpful, in my opinion, Stip, so I kindly request you to make constructive contributions.
Op 6 apr. 2013 om 14:07 heeft Stip stipen.treublatt@gmx.net het volgende geschreven:
On our wiki it is a very useful feature too. Removing it from the software just because it makes no sense on the en wikipedia is kind of ignorant.
Am 05.04.2013 16:49, schrieb Federico Leva (Nemo):
The page has been removed because it took several seconds to load on the English Wikipedia. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078 Niklas has already fixed the link, it needs to be backported to 1.21. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46719
On the "uselessness" of the special page: sure, on en.wiki it's 120k names, but e.g. on 178 Wikipedias it's a single very useful page of less than 50 names... http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/display.php?t=wp&s=ausers_asc
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Then why not make a configuration option with default value "false" that controls if the special page is shown or not? There are hundreds if not thousands of MediaWiki-installations out there that are small enough so that the inefficiency doesnt make a difference, and for those wikis the page is actually quite helpful.
Am 06.04.2013 14:22, schrieb Chad:
FWIW, I didn't remove it because it was slow on enwiki, but because the queries sucked and it doesn't scale. Just because a query is fast doesn't mean it's efficient...just means your dataset is small.
-Chad
FWIW the bug (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078) has been reopened by somebody else requesting this feature to be re-added, and Aaron already commented about how the queries could be made to suck less.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ On 4/6/2013 8:27 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
FWIW the bug (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078) has been reopened by somebody else requesting this feature to be re-added, and Aaron already commented about how the queries could be made to suck less.
+1 re-adding it back in and thanks for the link.
If the query was trash, then (IMO) there should have been some thought to improve it, switch it on or off, rate limit... not drop it completely.
Related in tracking down why ActiveUsers wasn't honoring the day limit set. If ActivedUsers is drawing from Recent Changes and $wgRCMaxAge is set to less than 30, I believe it is the cause of ActiveUsers not reporting 30 days of data correctly.
So now I'm perplexed. Should I file a bug? Or should this page:-
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgRCMaxAge#Affected_pages
be changed to note it. Or just take a 'don't worry about it' stance, it's been removed from core. Which by the way - was the original answer I got on IRC yesterday when I asked about the issue.
Tom
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org