Topic on Talk:Edit Review Improvements/New filters for edit review

Very useful - loving this new changes log. Wondering if it would be possible to, instead of selecting highlight a tag, have it's content hidden? (This might already be possible). That way I can not see lots of the AWB edits on EN WP.

Hi @Tom (LT). Glad the filters are working for you. The way to achieve your end, I think, is not through an "invisible" color, but through an "Exclude" function for the Tags filters. This idea has been discussed in the following ticket T174349. If you have thoughts about it, the best place to register them is in the ticket. We never rejected the idea—indeed it was classified as a "hot" ticket—meaning something the team feels has value. We basically just ran out of time and weren't sure how many people would use such a feature.

Know that if we did implement an Exclude mode for Tags, all Tag filters would be in Exclude mode--you wouldn't be able to pick and choose, including some Tags and excluding others. To see how that works, have a look at the Namespace filters, which offer an Exclude option. Would such a feature work for you? Or would your workflow require you to include some tags but exclude others?

Thanks for your reply. I'd like an option to hide some edits based on them being marked with a tag. For example, I wanted to hide certain types of edits (such as those marked with AWB, bots etc.). Example use would be monitoring only human edits without automatic tools

It sounds like an Exclude mode similar to what is available for Namespaces would work for you.

There is a ticket for this in Phabricator, T174349. If you want to talk further about the issue, that is probably the most useful place to do so. You'll see that that ticket is classified as "Hot," which means the team agrees with the idea and would like to do it, if the opportunity presents itself.

It seems the expected solution is letting perfect be the enemy of good. A hidden color is useful for many things aside from hiding tags. It could be used to further filter the visible results, rather than filtering the full entries that are retrieved from the database.

This would be a pretty cheap way of sub-filtering specific users, or indeed even filtering tags. For example, one could select all changes, then give a specific tag an invisible color. This would produce the same effect as the more complicated database filtering:

Basically, in pseudo-sql:

select * from change_tag, recentchanges
where  ct_tag= "AWB"
AND (rc_id = ct_rc_id OR rc_timestamp < "12324555" )
ORDER BY rc_timestamp DESC

In fact this is partly possible by simply highlighting a tag without clicking its checkbox (to make it filter). Then all the user needs to do is change their CSS to hide the row, for color number 5 e.g.:

.mw-rcfilters-highlight-color-c5 { display:none;}

The drawback is that true filtering would actually allow the user to see more results, unlike this hacky solution.

Hi anonymous user. My concern about the "invisible" color is not that it's hard to do, but rather that it might be hard to represent in such a way that users understand the feature. There's evidence that highlighting is already a bit hard for some users to discover and understand. And the idea of a "color" which hides things is somewhat counter-intuitive.

Thanks, however, for your coding examples. As I mentioned above, the best place to make this kind of comment is in the ticket, T174349. I'll copy over your remarks, in case they catch one of our programmers' eye.

Highlighting can still apply without any confusion. Consider that it is not possible to include an "Untagged edit". This is considerably different from the namespaces dropdown because selecting all namespaces will reveal all changes, unlike the "tags" dropdown. This means that it is not possible to use the highlight feature to focus on what you want to see (i.e. untagged and specific tagged changes).

That wouldn't change the principle behind the design. If performance is an issue with selecting both untagged and tagged, then it could simply disable the tagged changes when the untagged checkbox is clicked, and merely allow the possibility to highlight the changes.

The point is that it is fine to return a list of results using filters, but there is considerable value in applying further sub-filters only to the filtered information. For instance, special:wantedpages returns a lot of pointless content, and is already a filtered list from the database. Yet there is value in further excluding results from that without running another complicated and time consuming query, just like wikia did for their modded version ( http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WantedPages).