"BV" == Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com writes:
BV> Log pages are a pain. They quickly get too long to load BV> comfortably, so people end up manually editing them to archive BV> the information, but attributions of edits are lost when the BV> next automatic edit overwrites it.
For some reason, the history gets lost, too.
BV> They can't be programmatically resorted or filtered very BV> easily. And the upload log makes Special:Unusedimages rather BV> hit-and-miss by linking to every uploaded file...
Not to get too hung up on database-related solutions, but: would a database-related solution work here?
For example, having a logs table (or actions, or whatever) like:
action_type - "delete", "protect", "upload", "ban" action_user - user name action_object - article title, image title, user name action_timestamp - timestamp action_comment - what shows up in the comment on log pages now
This could be queried with a special query page, and you could navigate backwards and forwards in time.
The downside is that the changes wouldn't show up in Recent Changes, unless we made them.
~ESP