rowan.collins wrote:

As somebody pointed out on another bug report I just read, it's best to start
with a description of the problem and only later suggest possible solutions.

In this case, I think the problem you're trying to solve is "automatically watch
all sub-pages of this page"; this implies several things:

1. the ability to add multiple pages to the watchlist "as a bundle" - as with

bug 1710, this could, at its simplest, be done by generating a list of all
eligible pages at the time of request, and adding each one to the watchlist
(remember that a sub-page of "X" is simply one whose title begins "X").
Alternatively, you could have a special watchlist entry for "any title matching
this pattern", but this might make displaying the user's watchlist even more
inefficient than I believe it already is.

2. the ability to *remove* multiple pages from the watchlist "as a bundle" -

again, this could be implemented simply by searching the watchlist for matching
pages at the time of request; the "edit watchlist" page could perhaps group them
as sets (which might be nice anyway) and provide an "unwatch this and all
sub-pages" link where appropriate.

3. the ability to automatically start watching certain new pages - this is a

much larger problem, but might be necessary to make this watching a "bundle" of
sub-pages truly effective and useful; basically, it would require some way of
filtering the log of new pages (and moved pages) to look for ones which were
part of a watched "bundle" - where the "bundle" would probably be stored as a
watchlist entry for the "parent" page with a special flag set.

Notice that none of these require any changes to either the "parent page" or the
sub-pages themselves - if I've understood your intention correctly, the feature
would most logically be provided as an option on any page [in a namespace that
"allows" sub-pages] to the user who's doing the watching. Note also that the
features required could equally be applied more generally - in particular #3, if
it could be implemented efficiently, might be useful as some kind of "watch for
new articles with names matching <pattern>".

Michael.Keppler wrote:

I also think that the proposed solution is really bad for the problem to be
tackled. Especially as the _editor_ of a page would decide which pages are added
to the watchlist of _someone else_. A solution for adding/removing bunches of
pages to/from the watchlist should never ever be triggered by page content or
page attributes. It _must_ always be in the responsibility of the person who is
adding pages to his/her watchlist, so the searching or the pattern matching
proposed by Imsop are way better as a solution.

zigger wrote:

*** Bug 3113 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

• Bug 12308 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

The current workaround is to use Special:RecentChangesLinked which is generally found to be inadequate.

Changed component to "Watchlist"

Open since 2005, inactive in the past three years... If we want to reflect the current plans, this should be "lowest".

(In reply to Quim Gil from comment #7)

Open since 2005, inactive in the past three years... If we want to reflect
the current plans, this should be "lowest".

Setting accordingly. No one in Platform is working on this, but as always, patches are welcome.

Not a complete solution but Extension:WatchSubpages was created for some of the use cases.

The Growth-Team does not plan to work on this in the short-to-medium term.