Ok, you know what I'm talking about: "You have new messages (last change)."
My question/proposal is this: how difficult would it be, from a technical POV, to change "(last change)" to "(previous change)". In other words, I'm proposing this change:
CURRENT: (1) the software knows when a user has last visited their own talk page (conventional name: DATE:LASTVISIT) (2) the software knows when a user's own talk page has been modified last (conventional name: DATE:LASTCHANGE) (3) on each page access, the software compares DATE:LASTVISIT with DATE:LASTCHANGE, and if the last change is more recent than the last visit, it offers two links: one straight to the user's talk page, and the second to a diff between the current and the previous version of the user's talk page
PROPOSAL: (1) no change (2) no change (3) no change, except the second link would be pointing to a diff between the current version and the version just before DATE:LASTVISIT, whenever that might be.
The pragmatic advantage to this change would be that people could actually notice ALL changes in their talk pages between their previous and the current visit (as opposed to the current implementation, which only shows the last change, which is a pretty arbitrary metric). And technically I can't see any cost (except for the cost associated with the actual changes in the code, of course) -- but I might be wrong.
What do you think?
Gutza