Brion VIBBER wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
I've put in the same limits as Recentchanges. When I'm done messing with other things, I'll add the links to increase the limits if you want to see more.
I want to object that this has resulted in my receiving only the last three days of changes on my watch list, and there is nothing in my preferences to turn this off.
The options are already available in the URL like so: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=6
My apologies if I seem to jump in on this issue too fast. Thanks for dealing with this quickly, and for putting the options on the Watchlist page directly. Now, at your convenience, it would be nice if the options could be put on the user preference page. This would go a long way in accomodating the different work habits of contributors. As things now stand, I have 131 items on my watch list (including talk pages) with the oldest one being dated Feb. 25 - I would likely set my limits at 150 articles with an indefinite number of days.
Another place where a longer number of days option on the page would be convenient is the User contributions page. Often when looking at this for an unregistered user with questionable edits the default options give a very small number of edits with the last 24 hours. The question I then want to ask the system is whether this guy has done any other stupid edits in the last year.
Anyway, even as a non-techie I sense that completely reconstructing some of these pages every time must put an enormous burden on the system. At the risk of appearing naive, it seems that a Recent Changes File containing the maximum number of entries reflecting the most that people would normally expect to see on a regular basis would save a lot of unneeded searches. Searches with a higher number of references to be sought would still need to be done, but a judicious choice of the number of items in the recent changes would make such searches relatively infrequent.
1,000 items in the Recent Changes file where with every edit the most recent change is added and the 1000th is dropped could accomplish this.
Eclecticology