Extension:Recent Changes Cleanup

Description
With this extension, a sysop can mark any line on the Recent Changes page as coming from a bot (changes the 'bot' bit to 1) and that hides it from the RC page's default view. This is useful in dealing with vandalism or for general cleaning up of the RC page for any other reason. RevisionDelete can help strike out text but it does leave a mess. With this extension, you can keep your RC page as neat as you like. Anyone can still see those RC lines if they click "Show bots".

Installation

 * 1) Download the files and extract them to /extensions/RecentChangesCleanup
 * 2) Add the following line in the LocalSettings.php file:

Usage

 * Sysops will see a special page at the bottom "Other special pages" section called "Recent Changes Cleanup". You can also make links to that special page like for any other special page with Special:RecentChangesCleanup. A convenient place to have this link show up is on your Mediawiki message page:  MediaWiki:Recentchangestext.
 * Currently, any user with at least 500 edits is able to access this page (the number 500 can be edited in the file "RecentChangesCleanup_body.php"). This should not be a concern because if an editor has at least 500 edits, they are most likely "safe" and will not abuse the system. In any case this only hides a line in the RC so its not a serious issue. If you have problems with this, you can change the number to a higher number.
 * After clicking on that special page, the user will see options to hide/unhide any line in the RC. It shows only the last 100 changes. The default view for RC is 50 so this is more than enough.
 * Remember that the line is only hidden in the default RC view. It can still be seen by any user if they click "show bots"

Versions
This code has been tested on MediaWiki 1.18. It may work in other versions too but it has not been tested.

Known issues
Currently, if the summary contains HTML code, sometimes this may mess up the formatting of the special page. If this happens, the only way is to get into the database and delete that RC entry from the Recent changes table (mw_recentchanges), or write a '2d' in the 'rc_comment' column field of the table.

Questions/Requests
Sorry I havent made any effort to translate this or add additional features or make it work for other versions of MW. I dont plan on doing any of that due to lack of time. I just wanted to do something quick for myself and wanted to share it with anyone else who could use it and wanted to give back to the MW community. I hope this is useful for someone. Its sure been useful for me whenever vandalism strikes. Its a good small useful utility to have.