Help:Recent changes

The recent changes page lists the most recent edits made to. Editors can use this page to monitor and review the work of other editors, such as keeping an eye out for vandalism and for simple mistakes. Recent changes can be accessed at any time by clicking on 'Special:RecentChanges' in the sidebar.

Interface
The recent changes interface consists of two parts: filters, which can be used to help triage edits; and the actual recent changes list that shows the most recent edits made to the wiki.

Filters
uses the new filters for edit review functionality to provide a number of filters and coloring options that can be applied to assist editors in patrolling recent changes. By default, all edits made to the wiki made by everyone except bots are displayed in the recent changes list. You can filter the list to only show certain edits in order to make it easier to see the changes you are interested in.

Some of the filters offered include:
 * Unregistered - shows edits made by users who are not logged in.
 * Registered - shows edits made by users who are logged in.
 * Bot - shows edits made by bots.
 * Human - shows edits made by users who are not bots.
 * Unpatrolled - edits that have not yet been marked as patrolled.
 * Namespace - you can choose to show only edits made in certain namespaces.
 * Tags - you can choose to show only edits that have been marked with a certain tag.

For each filter, you can also choose to highlight matching edits by clicking on the "Highlight results" button and then choosing a color you want each edit matching the filter to be highlighted in. For example, you can choose to highlight unpatrolled edits a different color than patrolled edits so that they are easier to see. You can save your filter settings for later use by clicking on the bookmark icon on the right side of the filters interface. You will be prompted to specify a name for the set of filters you have enabled prior to saving. The next time you visit recent changes, you can quickly load the settings you have saved by clicking on the "Saved filters" button and then selecting the name of the filter you chose.

Recent changes list
By default, the recent changes list shows up to 50 changes going back up to 7 days. Newer edits are shown at the top of the list. The recent changes list looks something similar to this.


 * (Help:Diff | Help:Page history) . . ; 13:05 . . (+133) . . Tim Starling (talk | contribs)
 * (Help:Diff | Help:Page history) . .  ; 12:53 . . (-12) . . 192.0.2.16 (talk)
 * (Help:Diff | Help:Page history) . .   ; 12:45 . . (+672) . . Magnus Manske (talk | contribs)
 * (Help:Diff | Help:Page history) . . ; 12:21 . . (-644) . . Niklas Laxström (talk | contribs) ( Reverted edits by 192.0.2.16 (talk) to last version by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ) (Tag: Rollback)

From left to right:
 * The "" link points to the diff of the edit, which shows the changes made in that edit in comparison with the previous edit in the page history.
 * The "" link points to the revision history of the page, which shows a list of all of the edits made to the page.
 * A bold  means that the edit has been marked as a minor edit by the user.
 * A bold  means that the edit created a new page. This occurs when a user tries to edit a page that doesn't currently exist. Thus, their edit will be the very first edit to the page according to the revision history of the page.
 * A bold means that the edit has not yet been marked as patrolled.
 * The next link is a link to the edited page in question. If the link is bold, it means the page is on your watchlist.
 * The time the edit was made will be shown in UTC and in 24-hour format.
 * The number of bytes that were added or removed in the edit will be shown. The number will be green if the edit added to the page size, and red if the edit decreased the page size. If the edit did not affect the overall size of the page, the number will simply show "0 bytes" in plain text. The number will be bold if the amount of bytes added or removed exceed 500.
 * The next few links relate to the user who made the edit. The first part shows the username of the user, or their IP address if they edited while logged out. Clicking on this will take you to the user page of the user if they were logged in, or their user contributions page if they were logged out. The second part links to their user talk page. For users who were logged in, a third "contribs" link will point to their user contributions page.
 * The next part shows the edit summary of the edit, if the user chose to leave one.
 * Finally, any tags applied to the edit will be shown, if applicable.

Logs are shown in a slightly similar fashion.


 * (Special:Log/move); 12:01 . . Erik Möller (talk | contribs) moved page to  (More commonly referred to name) (Tag: PHP7)
 * (Special:Log/block); 11:58 . . Lewis Cawte (talk | contribs) blocked Spammer & Vandal Machine (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of indefinite (Spamming)

From left to right:
 * The first link points to the specific log that the entry belongs to.
 * The time and the user links are shown after that.
 * The actual details of the log entry follow. This depends on the type of log. For example, a page move log will show the previous title and the title the page was moved to. A block log will show the user or IP address that was blocked, followed by the time they were blocked for and any block parameters.
 * The description or summary for the log, if applicable.
 * Finally, any tags applied to the log entry will be shown, if applicable.

Display
You can change the number of edits shown on the list, as well as how far back the list goes, by clicking on the button with the gear icon showing the current settings in the top-right corner of the list. The list provides three options:


 * Results to show. This determines the maximum length of the recent changes list. Choose between 50, 100, 250, and 500 entries.
 * Time period to search. This determines how far back the list goes. By default, the recent changes list will only show edits made within the last 7 days. Choose between 1, 2, 6, or 12 hours, or 1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days.
 * Group results by page. If this option is checked, the recent changes list will group recent changes by day, and for each day it will further group the changes for each article, so that articles will only appear in the list once. This is useful if there were multiple changes made to the same article within a single day. You can click on the arrow to the left of the entry to expand the list of edits made to that article.

Duration
Recent changes will only store edits for a certain period of time, by default 90 days. Any changes made more than 90 days ago will not appear in recent changes.

Changed or lost edit records
If a page gets moved, edits made before the page move will continue to show in recent changes under their old name. If the creation of a redirect was suppressed, the diff links will continue to work properly, but the links to the page history and the page itself may break.

If a page gets deleted, its edits will be removed from recent changes. They will not be restored even if the page is later undeleted.

Recent changes feed
You can get an RSS and Atom web feed of recent changes by adding "&feed=rss" or "&feed=atom" to the end of the URL of the recent changes page. You can then provide this URL to a news aggregator program in order to get a feed of recent changes made to the wiki that you can use on other websites or in other applications. For example, uses this method to power a recent changes feed on its Discord server which is updated every 15 minutes.

Additionally, Miraheze uses the DiscordNotifications extension that provides an automatically-updating stream of recent changes that can be sent to any Discord server. Miraheze currently runs a global recent changes feed on their Discord server that shows edits made on all wikis on Miraheze.