Talk:Crosswatch: Difference between revisions

Suggestions:

• Make "Show only the latest change per page" the default. Otherwise it is chaos, and many people will instantly never come back.
• Same format as regular watchlist. 2 columns. 1 for time. 1 for all else. All else on one line, not putting author on second line.
• New 3rd column on the left for symbols of each wiki: Wikipedia, Commons, etc..
• Make that new 3rd column sortable. So people can easily separate the edits for the different wikimedia projects.
• Make the table expand to the full width of the page. Makes it much easier to scan the watchlist when there is only one line per item.
• Use actual times (UT) since it is for wikis across the globe. Watchlist as close as possible to format of regular watchlists.
• GUIs work best when they build on previous GUIs. Graphical user interfaces. Old watchlist as model to build on. With as few changes as possible.

--Timeshifter (talk) 06:55, 26 June 2015 (UTC) Reply

@Timeshifter: Thanks very much for the suggestions and sorry for the late reply.

• The latest change per page only is now the default
• I started with the current mediawiki watchlist format of having everything in one line but I strayed away from it because of several problems:

• the columns currently (time and project name) might be longer than expected and might need to overflow (depends on wiki/language) or the page titles might not be on the same horizontal line
• I've tried it and it didn't looked very good. It looked very crammed, I'll try to experiment some more to get a clean look
• I want to add the ability to show a diff of the edit when clicking on a watchlist event, this is kind of difficult if everything is in one line with not whitespace area

• I would like to improve "scannability" very much, but I am not convinced that one-liners are the solution. I've always thought that the current mediawiki watchlist needs an overhaul (e.g. I like the mobile watchlist much better) as it very packed with links.

• I'll try some things to make the second line less eye-catching.

• Generally I don't want to be to bound too much to the current mediawiki watchlist GUI, I consider crosswatch to be more a kind of experiment to do things a bit differently

• I know that deviating from a design that has been used extensively for years is hard, but it is limited and hinders the addition of more features and crosswatch, beeing external, has the luxury to try some things out.
• I would hope very much that one day MediaWiki supports cross-wiki watchlists natively, but I would like crosswatch to be useful even when this happens.

• The time shown is relative for now because because it is much easier to do it this way than converting it to the appropriate local time and add separators for daychanges. I'll look into it.

Thanks very much again, --Sitic (talk) 16:03, 29 June 2015 (UTC) Reply

PS: The ability to split the watchlist into the indivitual wikis (similar to Luxo's gWatch) is planed, but I'll look into it when some other features are done. --Sitic (talk) 16:06, 29 June 2015 (UTC) Reply

(unindent). Wikia has an interesting format. See:

• http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

Recent changes can be grouped. Arrows drop them down. Have to check the box for "Use advanced recent changes" in the "Under the hood" tab in my preferences in order to group them.

Crosswatch now has 3 lines for some entries. 3 lines in the left column:

 20 minutes 
 ago
 English

Why not allow the table to expand to the full width of the page? It solves most problems. I don't have a mobile device, and so I can't see that format. At least not at the link you left. Wikia tried multiple lines per watchlist entry. Many people, myself for instance, did not like it, and stayed with the standard watchlist. So I guess it is a matter of preference. Maybe put the choice in the preferences. I suggest the default though be what people are currently used to. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:41, 29 June 2015 (UTC) Reply

@Timeshifter: it only should be two lines (see e.g. File:Crosswatch.png). I've tried to fix this (I assume it's some font size issue) and also added an experimental oneline option ("traditional watchlist layout") to the settings. Can you try it out? --Sitic (talk) 15:04, 1 July 2015 (UTC) Reply

It would be very useful for the tool to respect the "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist", or to have a similar setting in the preferences. In areas with many edits per page per day, anything else is almost useless when you want to see what was actually changed. Julian Herzog (talk) 18:06, 1 July 2015 (UTC) Reply