CatchUp

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A feature that would allow you to ask the Wiki, "Show me all Changes that I haven't seen yet". For example, say you go away for a month or so and then come back and want to see what you've missed. At first this seems easy; just look at RecentChanges. But of course you won't be able to catch up in one or two days, and after that, if you are a RecentChangesJunkie, you will find that the top of RecentChanges contains new, recent changes, followed by a lot of changes that you have read, followed by changes that you missed during your absence. Since you don't bother to keep track of where the boundaries are, you eventually forget about the missed Changes, and, being a RecentChangesJunkie, are forever haunted by the possibility that you missed something particularly interesting or relevant (relevant, e.g., did someone answer a question of yours somewhere?).

As a WorseIsBetter shortcut, instead of actually keeping track of such things, a system on the wiki for remembering the boundaries (there may be multiple boundaries if you go away a lot) and filtering RecentChanges accordingly would be nice.

Perhaps the best place to do this, though, would be not be in wiki software but as a feature of ChangeAggregator software.

: Yes, I agree that would be a useful feature. I think conversations and work would go a bit smoother here. I am in an online community called [Brainstorms] (site down for updates) and there is the feature of CatchUp. I find it very useful. The problem that we have to consider is that site is private, and this isn't, so does it capture all the grafitti too? - MarkDilley - (p.s. I use the changes link to try and CatchUp here, it helps when people leave summary messages.)

: I'll check out brainstorms sometime. Yes, I guess the grafitti would also be marked for CatchUp, however, with RatingGroups this problem could be averted (i.e. the ChangeAggregator would help you prioritize looking at things that were flagged as interesting by a RatingGroup that you like). -- BayleShanks

Current technology does have the precursors to CatchUp. UseModWiki has a feature to show all changes since a given timestamp. Better, it conveniently calculates the timestamp of the last change visible and places this link on RecentChanges itself. You can sit there and whack that link all day until something changes. MoinMoin one ups this behaviour by stuffing that timestamp into a cookie. That way, the user can close the browser window yet return to CatchUp. However, neither of these solutions can deal with the situation described at the top of this page, in which regions of read and unread Changes are interleaved.

[CategoryWikiTechnology] [CategoryUnimplementedWikiTechnology]

CatchUp

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