User talk:Hhhippo/Flow/Activity monitor

Flow already highlight newer posts

Interesting stuff, thanks as always.

There's a related idea already implemented: when you click a notification about a topic you're watching, such as Oiyarbepsy and 1 other responded on Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page., then there's a fromnotif=1 URL parameter that triggers highlighting of newer posts,

If you look in flow-board.js flowHighlightPost you can see it's a simple "If this flow-id is greater than that, then highlight it." Someone could add a 'Highlight newer' to action menus, implemented in client-side JS. (So many gadget possibilities, so little time.)

There's a uuidTimestamp to convert a UUID to a timestamp, it's possible to convert a timestamp to a dummy UUID suitable for show all posts newer/older than a time.

I believe an edited posts's UUID doesn't change when edited, but we could put the UUID of the more recent version as a data attribute for similar "highlight changes since this post/a particular time" implemented in JavaScript.

-- SPage (WMF) (talk) 02:00, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! Yes, I had seen the fromnotif function, but I like the graphical design of the permalinks much better, that's why I linked there. I find the positioning of the fromnotif markers quite non-intuitive, and they are not very visible in terms of color and width. Plus, something like the permalink design would integrate better with Compact nesting.

Apart from the current design, the technical availability of this function is a good point. One could nearly already use this as a target for (cur) links in watchlists and history pages. Of course it works only for 'diffs' between a certain time and now, not between two arbitrary times, and it only marks new posts, but that's already an important use case. The next step could be marking posts as 'changed' if the 'last edited' timestamp is newer than the diff's start time. (That timestamp is already visible for edited posts, so I don't think this would even need an additional UUID.)

I'm not so sure if this should be done by client-side JavaScript though: once we get to showing a mark for removed posts or showing older revisions of posts, client-side JS will need to pull such things through additional API calls while a server-side mechanism could send all the needed data right away. — HHHIPPO 19:59, 3 November 2014 (UTC)