Help:Recent changes

The Recent Changes page in SM-201 lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in your MediaWiki project. Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users, allowing mistakes to be corrected and vandalism to be eliminated. There is a link to the Recent Changes page at the top or in the sidebar of each page.

Understanding Recent Changes

With the default preferences, the bulk of the page consists of fifty lines, one for each edit, looking like this:

(diff) {hist) . . Article04; 10:10 . . (+1,864) . . 127.0.0.255 (Talk) (Add examples)
(diff) (hist) . . m Article03; 10:08 . . (-14) . . User04 (Talk | contribs) (New page)
(diff) (hist) . . N Article03; 10:06 . . (+1,433) . . User03 (Talk | contribs) (New page)
(Move log); 10:05 . . User02 (Talk| (contribs) (moved Endnotes to Footnotes)
(diff) (hist) . . 'Article01'; 10:04 . . (+98) . . User01 (Talk | contribs) (Added examples)

The above list indicates there were five edits: (from the top)

the first by a user who is not logged in, edited Article04;
the second by User03 modified Article03;
the third by User03 created Article03;
the fourth by User02 who moved Endnotes to Footnotes;
the fifth by User01 who edited Article01

From left to right:

"diff" links to the diff-page for this edit; it is not available for new pages, or for page moves
The "hist" link corresponds to the Page history link on the edited page: it shows not just this edit but also older and newer ones. For page moves, the hist link leads to the history of the new page title
A bold m indicates that the user marked the edit "minor". Only logged in users can mark edits minor, to avoid abuse.
A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. It is possible for a change to possess both the "minor" and "new" indicators; this is typically used for new redirects.
A bold b indicates that the edit is made by a bot (an account with bot flag), or that the edit is hidden by an administrator.
A bold ! indicates that the page is unpatrolled. For more information see the Help topic
The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question.
- A bold Link indicates this page is part of your watchlist
10:06 refers to the time in UTC. You can change the time to your time zone using your preferences
(+1,864)

(generally a green number with a +, or a red number with a -) refers to the number of bytes that have been added or removed.

For logged in users, the next link is a link to their user page (as usual with internal links, the view page if the page exists, the edit page if it does not, the two being styled differently). For users who are not logged in, the link is to their User Contributions.
Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page (the same remarks regarding existence apply).
For page moves, a link is given to both the old and new title.

Preferences

Logged in users can set preferences to adjust the way that Recent Changes looks.

Hide minor edits in recent changes - this hides all edits that have been marked as minor by logged in users;
Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits are grouped together. This option uses a JavaScript, and won't work in every browser
Days to show in recent changes - You may select the number of days to be shown by default on the Recent Changes page.
Number of recent changes - You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default. Once on that page, links are provided for other options. In the case of Enhanced Recent Changes this number of changes includes those that are initially hidden.

Viewing new changes starting from a particular time

If you have loaded the recent changes at, for example, 21:34 Apr 25, 2024, it gives a link "Show new changes starting from 21:34 Apr 25, 2024", giving you the changes you have not seen yet. In order to use this link later, after you have used the browser window for other things, or if you switch off the computer in between, you can instruct your browser to bookmark it (with Internet Explorer: right-click on the link and choose "add to favorites"). Alternatively, you can save the page with recent changes.

To get the new changes without one of these preparations, use:

http://www.sm-201.org/a/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20240425213425

(format yyyymmddhhmmss, UTC time).

You can copy this URL to the address bar and change date and time. The "Number of titles in recent changes" set as preference is applicable. This feature can not be used in conjunction with "hide logged in users" (see below) unless the URL is modified manually.

Hiding logged in users from recent changes

Special:Recentchanges/hideliu is a version of recent changes that only shows changes by users who have not logged in. This can be useful for those watching out for vandalism. Features such as viewing changes starting from a particular time can be used with the hideliu feature, but only by manually altering the URL to add &hideliu=1 to it. For example, clicking the time (as described in the section above) may take you to the url

http://www.sm-201.org/a/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20240425213425

You would need to change this to read

http://www.sm-201.org/a/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20240425213425&hideliu=1

in order to view the recent changes without logged in users starting from this time.