Recent Changes Junkies Nightmare / Discussion

--Stefan: (to MtnViewMark) Speech! Speech!

I don't get it. If we're providing what junkies are looking for, then isn't that a good thing, instead of a nightmare? Someone who provides free junk to addicts is an angel, yes?

--Scartol

You may not know that previously, the old Recent Changes format was very disorganised and there was no Minor Edit button then. We the Recent Changes Junkies had a very difficult time trying to keep track where the discussion had taken place, and I myself constantly missed some changed pages.

Kudos to Arno and Morten who redesigned the Recent Changes, but we the users should do our part to keep the Recent Changes tidy, to make life easier to the everyone else. :-)

Obviously, I have not done a good job so far. :-(

--The second Recent Changes Junkies Nightmare

Arno: to Scartol: well, we junkies are looking for quality stuff. If someone just corrects a spelling mistake on a page, we are not really interested in it. Or just adding a link (like you did on PagesForBeginners Jan 4th (the [diff +0] entry)) - see MinorEdit for more info.

Stefan: For me it's not so much that I'm not interested in the minor changes. Everything that happens on SL interests me. It's just that following everything is very time consuming for a junkie if somebody adds a massive amount of stuff. Also there is the fear you'll miss an updated tidbit of information. Hence the nightmare aspect. But you're right, Scartol, that the junks are always grateful to the RecentChangesDealers.

dnerra: May I suggest a cure for RecentChangesJunkies' Nightmares? I think changing the "diff[+n]" format to "diff[+a-b]" should help. Surely a "diff+90-90" is more interesting than "diff+1-1", although they are both displayed as "diff[+0]" at the moment. (Of course, that's assuming that this is quick to implement for Arno and Morten -- well I am almost certain it is.)

Jonathan Cano: If we had frame maker style change bars between the current page version and the last that would help the junkies locate the junk. Alas, this is probably difficult to implement.

Arno: dnerra, it is not as simple as it seems. Currently, the diff is run separately from saving, the information not being available while saving. I will change the format of saves to use diffs some day (currently pages are saved full-text, even if you change only one letter). When changed RecentChanges could be made to look like that.

wms: To Arno: My first thought when you said changing one letter meant a new entry was, "My god! Think of the wasted disk space!"...my second thought was, "Who cares? As long as the wiki is in no danger of filling the disk, the easiest solution is best." so Arno, just out of curiousity, how big is the full Sensei's database? Big enough that you had to switch to 64-bit index entries in your MySQL database? I know that just the latest copies of pages is 19MB, so assuming on average 10 copies of each page, that makes only 190MB which really isn't bad at all. As long as the size of the wike stays reasonable, I'd say forget about diffs. If you want to be able to do +/- entries in the changelog, you can use diff to generate only that data - using diffs in the database would make it much more complex to fetch old versions of a page. Ugh, might as well go to CVS as your database backend once you start that.

Arno: I changed that behaviour some months ago. Now only the diff is saved - it is not as complex as you might think, as I already had the diff view in place. Currently we have about 7400 wiki pages and 43000 archived versions. They use about 30MB and 60MB. Plus some other tables SL currently uses 150MB. If I still did full text saving in the archive then it would use about 300MB - would not be that large either :o) Recently I have been thinking about storing full text again, as it would allow some functions for maintaining SL that are very hard to implement with diff saving.

to Jonathan: how do frame maker change bars look like? I have never seen them.

KarlKnechtel: Hee hee... that's what I get for jumping right into things I guess. :) I've tried to explain a few things at an easier level, if only to test my own understanding of them. The initial apparant simplicity of Go has this way of stimulating creative juices... I've also fixed some pages by escaping links, so the UndefinedPages wouldn't list things like "652x132mm" or "sic".

unkx80: Thank you, KarlKnechtel. The large demand has to be matched with enough supplies, so... =P

KarlKnechtel: I don't really think it's fair to shift the blame onto doulos, lavalyn... if people are just updating that table of who's uploaded what, I think the 'minor edit' checkbox is appropriate - ?

one day, I want to be on this page as well!

  Me too!