Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2010/March

30 day limit in "Related Changes"
The 30 day limit for listing changes to pages in a given category seems rather short. If I wanted to check the changes since the last PDF version of a book was created, for example, then a longer period would be useful for many books. Is there any reason why this limit could not be increased to 12 months? Recent Runes (talk) 10:50, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Looks like $wgRCMaxAge is the setting that effects this. I have no idea if there is a reason why the limit is kept where it is. You could try to pursue the community to increase this limit, than file a bug request if the community supports the change at which point either the limit is increased or a reason is given for why the limit cannot be increased. --dark lama  12:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Increasing the value will not allow us to immediately see recent changes 12 months ago, just that it will start holding onto them for 12 months. Additionally, I wonder if there would be a performance impact allowing the table to bloat to 12 times its original size.  The default value for it is supposedly 91 days.  Select the 30 day option from the interface, then change the value in the address bar to 90 instead of 30.  Additionally, choose the option for 500 changes and change that to 5000 in the address bar as well.  I did try this on Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book and Blender 3D: Noob to Pro; however, I could only go back as far as February 9.  The developers probably have set a value just over 30 days in the configuration since you can't easily see more than that from what you can click on in the interface.  That points out that even if this value is increased, the interface doesn't give a one-click option for any period longer than 30 days and that would require changes to the Mediawiki software, rather than just the configuration.  While they could change the configuration value, they may not alter the software if sites like Wikipedia don't hold onto changes longer than 30 days for performance reasons; having the option in the interface for that site would be misleading if it doesn't record them longer than 30 days. -- Adrignola talk contribs 13:44, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually there are configuration options to change the display that shows one click options too.
 * $wgRCLinkLimits could be changed to array(10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000);
 * $wgRCLinkDays could be changed to array(1, 7, 14, 28, 30, 31, 365);
 * --dark lama  14:23, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, then the only limitation is whether the community will support it. Nice work on finding those values. -- Adrignola talk contribs 14:39, 11 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The script  can be used to "re-populate the recentchanges table as noted here: $wgRCMaxAge. Also, the default value is 13 weeks since for MediaWiki 1.16.0. 216.226.40.179 (talk) 16:56, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

If these are global settings for all the Wikimedia projects, do you think it likely they would be changed just for Wikibooks? If so what is the process to follow? Recent Runes (talk) 15:25, 11 March 2010 (UTC)