1

While I know this issue has already been raised several times (specifically by @ItsPugle ) it has become an absolute pain to many users who use RCP, including myself. The short of it is that when I or someone else attempts to press the “patrol” button on the last edit in the queue, it either refuses to patrol (i’ve had that issue particularly on the desktop mobile site) and also an issue where the last edit patrols and displays the victory screen, but upon refreshing the page reappears at the end of the queue. It 's a real issue and I really hope engineering can do something soon. Thoughts?

2

Hmm, yes, I think many of us have noticed this at times; there are a few scenarios where an edit won’t go through RCP or be marked, and I think that’s been the case for some ‘last edits’ in the queue for quite a while at least. However, they’re always patrollable from old-school/traditional RC, and I believe they can be patrolled by reversing the order of RCP too, once there’s more than one edit in the queue. There are a number of cases out there of edits that won’t show in RCP or can only be marked from the traditional RC list (including your own edits, edits you’ve skipped, edits to the MediaWiki namespace, edits on pages that have had a title change without a redirect, and sometimes the last edit in the queue). With this case, since it’s the last edit, I don’t think it creates any kind of block in the RCP queue, and RCP is rarely at zero anyway… so I’m not sure I understand why it’s an absolute pain? What’s the source of frustration - am I missing anything? I may be able to ask an engineer to look into it, but RCP is a very complicated tool with some pretty convoluted code, so making changes there can be a risky thing. I’d hate to risk introducing more significant bugs over something that seems pretty easy to work around by patrolling that one last edit from the traditional RC list or by patrollers in RCP doing a mixture of forwards and backwards mode.

3

@Anna , I believe Joel means it’s an absolute pain to RCP perfectionists who want to get RC down to zero.:wink:I will be honest, though, it bothers me a bit, too. But then again, I don’t patrol from RCP much these days.

For newer members reading this thread who aren’t super familiar with patrolling via Recent Changes, I’ll post instructions so you can get that last edit out of there:

  1. Access Special:RecentChanges and look for the unpatrolled edit(s) - alternatively, hide patrolled edits ( this link takes you to the last 50 unpatrolled edits)
  2. Open the unpatrolled edit(s) by clicking “Diff” on the side (if it’s page creation, then just click the page title)
  3. Mark the edit as patrolled by clicking the “Mark as patrolled” button, which is both in the diff and at the bottom of the page

I hope this is something that can be fixed quickly and with no issues, but I believe RCP is one of those tools where you can just lightly tap it and something breaks. The bug is no stress while we have that workaround. But if something goes wrong and Special:RecentChanges breaks, then yeah, we’d have an issue, so Anna, please ask the engineers to not inadvertently break Recent Changes if/when they work on RCP:stuck_out_tongue:

4

Thanks for writing that up, Alex! We have these guides, too, should anyone wish to bookmark: https://www.wikihow.com/Patrol-Recent-Changes-on-wikiHow-(Traditional) https://www.wikihow.com/Patrol-Recent-Changes-on-wikiHow-(Reverse-Order)

Ya pretty much:slight_smile:I can certainly file this, but given the risks of changing anything in RCP and the workarounds available, I suspect it’s the kind of thing that our engineering team might only prioritize for a fix if they’re already working on RCP for other, more urgent purposes. It’s possible it could be addressed as part of other changes in due course, though, so it doesn’t hurt to have it on file. I’ll take care of that. Thanks!

5

When you’re late to the party

As Joel said, it is quite annoying for a crazy RCP perfectionist like myself. Although it can simply be fixed, it can often happen more then once in a day. A few days ago, I got about 20 straight edits that made my do the manual version. 

I’m not sure if wikiHow has a dev server (like dev.wikihow.com ) or something, but maybe just getting an engineer to just have a quick wizz through the sorting and approving code if they’ve got time might be a good idea; Nothing urgent though!

6

@Anna No Anna. When you try to patrol only one edit or it is the last edit on the bottom of the list, when you go to either mark the edit as Patrolled or skip it, the links change to “Done patrolling” after pressing “mark as patrolled” or skip. If you then watch the list, it doesn’t patrol these edits, and you kinda have to ride it out and wait until there are other edits in the queue.

7

Hmm, honestly, that hasn’t been my experience, working from Special:Recentchanges. Since RC is low right now, I just tried it out and was able to mark the lone, last edit in the queue several times in a row, from traditional RC, from a couple of different test accounts. I do get that it’s an issue in RCP, though. Ideally we will fix it at some point so we don’t have to use the workarounds - I did file it and hope that it will be addressed eventually. It’s the kind of thing that’s likely to get a fix either when an engineer is next making bigger changes to the tool, or perhaps when we have an engineering intern looking for a challenge during the summer:slight_smile: