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Flow: Flow board history shouldn't usurp action=history (prio from Nick)
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Description

The [View history] tab for a Flow board shows the board history, as it should.
But if you want to see the history of the wikitext of the page before it was a Flow board, or if you want to see the "/* Taken over by Flow */" edit in which it became a Flow board, you can't. Flow usurps action=history to mean show board history.

I don't see any good reason to do this. LQT also reuses the [View history] tab, but it changes it to invoke ?lqt_method=talkpage_history; Flow should similarly invoke its own action (e.g. action=board-history or action=flow_history ?), so that you can still query action=history.

Note that we think we will normally move existing content to /Archive(N+1) subpage when Flowifying or converting from LQT, so you can get the page history before it was Flow at the archived page. So this isn't critical, but again there's no good reason to cut off action=history.

Workaround: use Special:Export and uncheck "Include only the current revision, not the full history." Note that using the API (action=query&prop=revisions &rvprop=contentmodel|comment ) to get revision history gives wrong information for revisions prior to a Flow board, bug 73537.


Version: master
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz73538

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 3:50 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz73538.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

It seems better still would be one integrated history, under action=history.

Flow history used to be way different originally. We ultimately went back to something more similar to regular page history.
That may have been why we don't properly integrate & just take over completely.

+1 for integrated history

matthiasmullie set Security to None.

+1 for integrated history (IIUC).

I imagine one of the reasons we wanted to re-use action=history is so that scripts/gadgets/etc would direct people to the current (presumably right) place, without requiring changes. (E.g. Navigation Popups currently works fine, to send me to a Flow History page, even if it doesn't display the right information.)

DannyH renamed this task from Flow: Flow board history shouldn't usurp action=history to Flow: Flow board history shouldn't usurp action=history (prio from Nick).Jan 12 2015, 6:15 PM
DannyH moved this task from Untriaged to Team discussion on the Collaboration-Team-Triage board.

Related: API queries to a flow board's revision table don't yield useful information. I was expecting it to because I noticed Flow boards have the traditional "view history" tab, with lists of revisions as though it were a classic history page, but this does not bear out in the API.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Hampshire&action=history (several people posting)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&prop=revisions&rvlimit=max&titles=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Hampshire (Quiddity talking to himself)

It's related, but not a duplicate. If Flow used a separate URL for history, pointing to Special:History would have the same effect as now: It still wouldn't show anything useful. We want useful history for Flow boards on mobile either way.