Help:Enhanced recent changes

The preferences can be set to use the Enhanced Recent Changes feature (not for all browsers) instead of the classical Recent Changes. It groups recent changes per day by article, displays the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change (send ideas for improvement to Magnus Manske, the author of this feature).

Multiple edits on the same day to a single article are grouped together on the Recent Changes screen. All the edits except for the most recent one are hidden, but can be revealed by clicking on the blue arrow next to the article. This option uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser (see Browser issues with MediaWiki).

This feature applies also to Related changes, but not to the watchlist.

Composition of lines
(For the pages Wikipedia:Upload log, the corresponding pages on Wiktionary and Wikibooks, and perhaps a few more pages some links are not present).

Pages for which there is only one edit
The line shows:
 * time (the date is not shown here, it is in a header)
 * page name linked to the current version
 * the link cur to the edit concerned, e.g. http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Election_results_2005&curid=19333&diff=178548&oldid=178465
 * hist linking to the page history
 * user, linked to his or her user page
 * Talk, linking to the user talk page
 * edit summary

Pages for which there are multiple edits
The top line, which is the only one shown before clicking on the arrow, shows:
 * time
 * page name linked to the current version
 * number of edits during the day concerned (if it is the oldest day covered by this Enhanced Recent Changes page: restricted by the total number of edits covered by this page)
 * the link changes to the cumulation of these changes
 * Link Page history
 * the users, linked to their user pages

The lines per edit show:
 * time, linked to the page version created at this time
 * the link cur to this edit
 * the link last to this edit
 * user, linked to his or her user page
 * Talk, linking to the user talk page
 * edit summary

Examples
The default recent changes looks like this:
 * (diff) (hist) . . MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae; 10:06 . . 111.222.33.44 (Talk) (Add examples)
 * (diff) (hist) . . M MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae; 10:04 . . Anthere (Talk) (links)
 * (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki User's Guide; 10:04 . . Brion VIBBER (Talk) (New page)
 * (diff) (hist) . . Endnotes moved to Footnotes; 10:03 . . Maveric149 (Talk)

Enhanced recent changes shows changes to one page on the same line, with an arrow next to it:

10:06 MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae (2 changes; Page history)  [ 111.222.33.44; Anthere ] N. 10:04 MediaWiki User's Guide (cur; hist). . Brion VIBBER (Talk) (New page)  .. 10:03 Endnotes moved to Footnotes (cur; hist). . Maveric149 (Talk)

Clicking this arrow expands the entry so you can see all the changes made:

10:06 MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae (2 changes; Page history)  [ 111.222.33.44; Anthere ] . . . . . . 10:06</tt> (cur; last). . 111.222.33.44 (Talk) (Add examples) <font color=#eee>. . .. . <tt>M</tt> <tt>10:04</tt> (cur; last). . Anthere (Talk) (links) <tt>N</tt> <font color=#eee> <tt>10:04</tt> MediaWiki User's Guide (cur; hist). . Brion VIBBER (Talk) (New page) <font color=#eee> .. <tt>10:03</tt> Endnotes moved to Footnotes (cur; hist). . Maveric149 (Talk)

Common installation error
In projects outside Wikimedia it may happen that during installation one forgets (or perhaps it is missing in the installation instructions?) to copy three little image files:

http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_r.png http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_r.png

http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_d.png http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_d.png

http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_.png http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/Arr_.png (blank)

to the corresponding directory. As a result the enhanced Recent Changes are more cumbersome to use.