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RecentChanges rss feed should indicate change type or log action <title>s
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Description

Gentlemen, there is something very wrong with the feeds (for which
Bugzilla has no exact Component).

The problem is not noticeable on large wikis, however it is very
noticeable on smaller wikis, where not almost every change is an edit.

Let's look at some <titles>.

I'm using a zh-tw wiki in this example, but I'm sure the problem extends to all languages.

<title>使用者:Jojocdlin</title>
<title>使用者:曉諭</title>
<title>使用者:阿籽</title>
<title>使用者:Catmia</title>
<title>使用者:D00379</title>

What each of these are are new users just signing up.

The problem is these entries look exactly like edits to their user
pages! But in fact all they did is sign up. The have not edited any
pages at all.

Therefore we see that in the case where what you are reporting is not
just a simple page edit, well, then you should mention more there in
the <title>, as many reader programs only show <title>s at their
highest browsing level.

Now let's look at another wiki.

<title>使用說明:說明</title>
<title>彰化縣警察局</title>
<title>討論:首頁</title>
<title>彰化縣警察局田中分局</title>
<title>台中縣警察局大甲分局</title>
<title>彰化縣警察局溪湖分局</title>
<title>民防</title>
<title>海岸巡防署</title>
<title>討論:首頁</title>
<title>海岸巡防署</title>
<title>彰化縣警察局田中分局</title>
<title>彰化縣警察局員林分局</title>

Here again a mix of new users signing up, simple page edits, page
deletions, etc. etc.

The administrator has to click each one to find out what is going on,
as you have made them all look like regular page edits. Crazy!


Version: 1.16.x
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz17869

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:32 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz17869.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom shows not only titles but also descriptions of what is going on. If you are following the feed you can see the full items and you don't need to click a page o know that this is just a user creation.

Is this enough?

These feeds get processed via e.g., GWENE.ORG into e.g., NNTP, HTML...

I don't think we should move $stuff into the <title> just because some other places only parse <title> while you are interested in $stuff.

Fine, like those sites which make all their window <title>s the same so they cannot be distinguished in the browser, or some rudimentary mail system where the Subjects are all the same. Have it your way.

Let's keep the discussion constructive. What you are asking for is:

Taking as a reference
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom

  • "User account $XYZ was created" should be the title and not the description when new accounts are created, instead of "User:$XYZ"
  • "$ABC deleted $XYZ" should be the title and not the description when pages are deleted, instead of "$XYZ".

At https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges these two types of entries are indeed treated differently. One is related to the User creation log, the other to the Deletion log. I haven't looked at the code providing the feed feature, but probably there are different instructions to aggregate this different sources.

After some polishing the request makes sense, it is consistent with the RecentChanges page and it reuses existing strings. Marking as Enhancement and venturing to add the "easy" keyword to promote it as a potential task for new contributors.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.
kostajh subscribed.

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