Extension talk:RevisionSlider/2023

This is the feedback page for the RevisionSlider extension. Read about what we've learned about creating a RTL-accessible extension. Please report all RTL-related issues on this talk page!

Suggestion: Please make section vertically taller

Its right now I think the vertical bars do not have enough room to show the potential difference in changes. For example you can just barley tell between something thats a minor grammatical change and something that has rewritten half the page. It would be useful if there was some option to expand the page. Reallygreatoaktree (talk) 16:15, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm really curious, but need a screenshot or example page to understand the problem better. As of now the graph is logarithmic and dynamically scales so that the biggest change takes up 100% of the available height, with all other changes scaled accordingly. It's mathematically not possible for a minor change to look identical to a rewrite. Not even when a page's history contains a change that replaced the entire page. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 18:48, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Well I don't mean and didn't say it's impossible to tell the difference what I mean is that the difference between a minor change and a major change could be more visually noticeable when sifting through a large list of edits. So it would be nice but not required if it was possible to make the section taller by not using a logarithmic system and instead using a linear one. Reallygreatoaktree (talk) 13:33, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I hope that clarifies it I just wanted to see if there was any way to make it easier for editors to find potentially malicious or significant edits in the history. I have included a screen shot showing the issue https://imgur.com/SA0QKpF. The high bar to the right is the a major edit while the other edits are either template edits or other wise minor.

Thanks for the help,

Reallygreatoaktree Reallygreatoaktree (talk) 13:50, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I would love to understand better which page that is, on which wiki? How big are these changes according to the information shown in the popups?

The best theory I have at the moment is that what you describe as a "major" edit was removing and adding a similar amount of bytes, but the total size of the page didn't change much. The RevisionSlider bars are meant to show how much the size of a page changed, i.e. the same as the +/− in the watchlist. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 10:35, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Doesn't work in Chromium?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Hi, I've stumbled across this nice extension, but it seems like it does only work in Firefox.

When using Vivaldi (in a new private window) I can move the sliders but the pages shown / diff won't change.

I guess that must be known already, but maybe there could be a warning somewhere in the tutorial to curb expectations. 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:14, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the report, that's super helpful! RevisionSlider is supposed to work the same in all browsers including Vivaldi. Can you possibly provide more information? Especially on which wiki this happens and which skin you are using? Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 09:28, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I've just tested it again on the english Wikipedia with the article of the day.

No special skin, just the default.

To be sure that no extensions / addons are interfering, I used a new private window. 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:07, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I can't post a direct link to a screenshot, but here you go

imgur dot com /a/CDjtNB8 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:12, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

And here is the popup for the yellow dot:

imgur dot com /a/4Eyl4fx

The popup on the yellow dot says: Date 3 November 2022, the revision shown under it says: Date 19 November 2022.

The blue dot is on the rev. from 20 Nov, which is correctly shown underneath. The next earliest revision is the one from 19th Nov which is shown on the left instead of the one that was selected with the yellow dot.

I have tried a few things:

In the Revision history, select two versions that are not directly in sequence and click "compare selected revs". Then open the slider. The two revisions will be shown correctly.

Now click on the lower half of the graphic to move only the yellow dot.

As a result, the yellow dot will move to the new position, but the blue dot will move right next to it. (Is this a bug or a feature? It's not intuitive to me.) Both the displayed revisions will be changed to the new dates.

If you instead drag the yellow dot, the blue dot will remain where it was. But dragging the yellow dot will not lead to a refresh of the revision shown underneath.

Dragging the blue dot seems to crash the RevisionSlider: the revision comparison disappears after some delay, and the article is shown instead (but the title says [Article Name]: Difference between revisions) 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:33, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Checking on the German Wikipedia, I can't drag the blue dot at all with Vivaldi.

When I started with two not adjacent revisions, they were displayed correctly.

When dragging the yellow dot, the revision shown will change to the one that comes just before the one with the blue dot. 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:42, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Broken click behavior on RTL wikis

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Hi. Is there any hope the Revision Slider will work once on RTL wikis? IKhitron (talk) 12:27, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm a bit surprised. RevisionSlider is RTL-compliant pretty much ever since. I just tested it on a random RTL page and it works fine, as far as I can see.

Maybe you can describe the problem in more detail? Are you referring to the Hebrew Wikipedia? Maybe you accidentally disabled RevisionSlider in your preferences? Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 09:40, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I always liked the Slider, and used it a lot on hewiki. I also participated very heavily in discussions about its creation. It was very helpful and worked in perfect way. But about a year or more ago it broke. I explained the problem to the creators in details. Don't remember if it was on this page, on Phabricator or anywhere else. Since then I'm waiting for the fix.

Now for the problems. There are two, and looks like they are interconnected and probably even have the same cause. The smaller problem is that clicking to "move to the previous screen" sometimes responds unexpectedly, didn't find any rules for this part. The bigger problem is that clicking on some particular revision always finds some another revision of the page. There was no case in all this time that I get the revision I expected to get, even by chance. Maybe it's because of RTL, because I suspected that if one clicks on fifth revision from the left on a current screen, they get the fifth revision from the right, and vice versa. But I'm not sure about this counting, maybe I'm wrong. IKhitron (talk) 11:17, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

This sounds like it's related to phab:T336729 and maybe phab:T349208. I believe I can reproduce the issue now. I created a new ticket for us to keep track of it, see phab:T352169. Thanks a lot for the detailed report! We will definitely look into this.

A temporary workaround I found is to collapse the tools menu on the left. It looks like RevisionSlider works as expected without this menu. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 12:38, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

No, all this does not fit the problem. I never uncollapsed the side menus, all three of them - main, tools, and TOC. IKhitron (talk) 12:43, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Let's create an example. I have an URL like this. It's exactly one revision diff. I open it. I click on RevisionSlider. I click on some revision on the left part of the slider. I get this, one old dot and two new dots. I try in the old Vector, I get this, three new dots. Back in Vector 2022. I add uselang=en. I get this, one old dot and one new dot, exactly as expected. Also, safemode does not help in this problem. IKhitron (talk) 13:07, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Anyone? Thiemo Kreuz? IKhitron (talk) 16:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, 23 day later, no answers. IKhitron (talk) 01:30, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

The Technical Wishes team is tracking this via phab:T352169 and already invested quite some time in this and related issues, notably phab:T336729. Unfortunately we couldn't figure it out so far. What we know is that the underlying issue is probably as old as RevisionSlider itself. The reason we only see it now is because of the new Vector skin. We are very much interested in fixing this but need to invest our very limited resources wisely. For the moment the product decision was made to give this a lower priority as it's not blocking users from working with the history. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 10:55, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Both of these tickets have nothing to do with the problem, @Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE). They are about menus in Vector 2022, when I'm talking about the fact that the Slider does not work at all in all the skins. IKhitron (talk) 11:03, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Hello, @Aaron Liu. Could you tell me, please, why did you reverted this edit? The phabricator ticket has nothing to do with the problem. Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 09:37, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

1. 14 minutes later, that account did some quite banal vandalism on another page. I assumed this one was also vandalism.

2. The slider seems to work as expected? Aaron Liu (talk) 12:34, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

1. I see, Aaron Liu, thank you. 2. The slider does not work on RTL wikis more than a year, at least for me. IKhitron (talk) 17:01, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I've tried your link with the default language and it works perfectly for me. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:19, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

It worked for me to once or twice, and didn't work dozens of times, as you can see in the screenshots. IKhitron (talk) 09:40, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

A couple of months later. Is there something new? Maybe you should just remove the RevisionSlider at all on RTL wikis until you found and fix the problem. As with graphs or wikicode highlighting. For now, it just takes space. IKhitron (talk) 08:38, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

You can collapse it, and it works for a lot of people.

Also, the linked task has had a lot of patches lately. Maybe it'll be fixed when you check back next Wednesday? Aaron Liu (talk) 14:19, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

What do you mean in "you can collapse it", @Aaron Liu, how does it help in all the screenshots I brought? I'll check, no problem, but the fix is about Vector 2022, and the RevisionSlider does not in any design. IKhitron (talk) 11:56, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Clicking on the header of the revision slider can prevent it from taking up that much space. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:37, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Still a non-working feature better will not appear at all. IKhitron (talk) 07:39, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Feels like we're talking in circles :p

It works in Hebrew for me Aaron Liu (talk) 12:05, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Yap. It just means there are some conditions to work and different ones not to work. I have a suspicion that it can depend on browser, but I can't approve or disapprove this, because I really don't know what happens inside the RevisionSlider, and how to debug it. If this is the problem, it works wrong at least in Samsung Internet, last version. But the condition must be something completely different either. IKhitron (talk) 12:13, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Hey all! Thanks a lot for the patience. We kept working on this the past months, one step at a time, and documented our findings in phab:T352169. The one remaining issue we have been able to reproduce on our machines is finally gone with the current MediaWiki release. Please let us know if it works for you as well. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 13:37, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, @Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE), I've checked now, on hewiki, and all the problems looks to be disappeared. On different skins. Don't know how it's possible, I never make more than 100% screen, but still. I'll try a couple more times in case in the next few weeks, to check if I've missed something, but I really hope that this time everything is fine. IKhitron (talk) 14:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Let bars show "total changes" instead of delta

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Currently, the bars are showing the change in page size. This is nice, but it's not the most important aspect about an edit to the page. If someone would replace every letter of the page with an x, it wouldn't change the page size.

Maybe you could make the bars represent the "total of characters changed"? So that adding or removing a letter equals 1, but replacing a letter with another equals 2 ticks in the bar height, because it is actually 2 changes (removing and then adding)?

The bars could then sit on a baseline, with only one direction to show the total changes.

Alternatively, the bars could show the characters added on the top of the baseline, and the characters removed could be on the bottom. This would be a lot of useful info in one view. 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:34, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

You explained the idea really well. Thanks for that! We discussed this several times (just recently here). Unfortunately it's a hard problem. Not only is a "number of characters that actually changed" nowhere to be found in the database. It's not possible to reliably calculate it. Any number would be a questionable estimate. For example, what if a paragraph was moved but no other change made? Technically the new version contains all the same characters as before. How to visualize this? Something like -500/+500 wouldn't be correct because these 500 characters aren't removed from the article. They just moved to another position. Should we estimate the minimal number of keystrokes it takes for a cut and paste operation? Or should it be 0 because nothing actually changed? Which is what currently happens.

Personally I like the idea very much. But I'm afraid it's not possible. Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) 10:30, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick reply. I see now that this is really much harder than I initially thought. 84.139.192.199 (talk) 12:00, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.