Björn wrote me an email saying he missed Recent Changes. @Sandra@idiomdrottning.org wrote me an email saying she used Recent Changes a lot. @bouncepaw@merveilles.town wrote me an email saying he used Recent Changes a lot. Clearly, I needed to take another look.
The first question to consider is why I didn't appreciate Recent Changes. I think I checked Recent Changes obsessively because I was afraid of vandalism and spam. I was also somewhat anxious about comments. I like agreement but I'm quite conflict averse. So with the possibility of strangers making edits gone, there seemed to be no point to Recent Changes.
The way Bouncepaw put it in an email was that he used it when "continuing where they left off". Sandra had been involved in a site years back and said "the place was deadsville until we figured out a way to put recent changes on the front page and then it came alive". Björn said he knew I was often adding comments to old pages and he enjoyed following along. With Recent Changes gone, the front page just listed *new* pages and he'd lose access to those updates.
All of these are valid points.
I needed something like the font page, a page with links. Oddmu already knows how to turn these into a feed. I didn't want to keep a log like I had done for Oddmuse, where every change was logged as either "minor" or "major". People didn't quite understand what this was for. I also couldn't do without a distinction because in the last few days and weeks I have made thousands of small changes from the command line, trying to fix broken links and the like. Those changes should definitely not show up on Recent Changes.
I finally remembered how Recent Changes had worked on Ward's Wiki, also know as the Portland Pattern Repository, the first wiki.
Note that RecentChanges is not a database query of some sort: it is just like any other WikiPage, editable and textual. It's just that the server takes an interest in adding to the end of it (and in deleting redundant lines). – What is Recent Changes?
(Note that the link above points to a mirror that strips the Javascript redesign from the original wiki page, WhatIsRecentChanges.)
And so I went back to that idea. The server adds links to changes whenever I edit or add to a page and don't remove the checkbox that says "add link to the list of changes".
Oh, and diffs are also back. I don't keep a version history, but I do have backup files for an emergency. One step of undo is better than no undo, surely.
#Oddµ
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Phoebe lessons learned for Oddmu