Recent changes has become rather crowded with all that cursed popularity of Wikipedia :-)
One often-mentioned solution was the ability to filter Recent changes by categories. Well, now you have it!
It's turned off by default, no worries. To enable, set $wgAllowCategorizedRecentChanges in LocalSettings.php
It uses my aforementioned class to determine wether an article belongs to a category or one of its sub(subsubsub...)categories. Categories can be entered on the Recent changes page, separated by "|". You can filter for articles belonging or either any or all of the given categories (OR/AND).
Once the usual authorities had a look at it, I'd like it to be enabeled on some medium-sized wikipedia to determine the impact on the database slave servers, which might or might not be severe.
I think this would be a very efficient way of managing our "RC patrol forces" by dividing the huge amout of changes-to-be-checked into smaller chunks.
What's missing is "articles that don't belong to any category". Yet!
Magnus