"Tim Starling" t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote in message news:dpgk3s$7f4$1@sea.gmane.org...
kate wrote:
Phil Boswell:
Was this the set of changes which removed the "offset" parameter from [[Special:Whatlinkshere]]? The new "from" parameter, which seems to work on datestamps, is intriguing but hardly conducive to "ignore the first N entries". Can we have the "offset" parameter back, please?
i think it's unlikely any "offset" parameters will be added in the future (at least, i hope not). the reason offset was removed from several pages (Contributions, Whatlinkshere) is that it requires the database to search though every entry to find the offset you want. a request for starting at a particular record is much faster because it can be found quickly from the index.
Right, we've known for a while about the poor performance of offset clauses. The problem was fixed in several places already. I was doing some work on Special:Whatlinkshere while I was working on templatelinks, and took the opportunity to fix it there as well. Like Kate says, the offset parameters are gone for good.
Fair enough: thanks for a speedy and complete response.
If you're making these various pages more uniform, would it be terrifically complicated to add NAMESPACE dropdown selectors to each one?
It would actually be handy to be able to restrict Special:Whatlinkshere to a particular namespace.