Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200319160218/@comment-35455167-20200320110817

One of the issues I have with the new Recent Changes (as opposed to the old Recent Changes and Wiki Activity) is a compatibility issue. The filters never load. This is an "at least I can still change my phone's batteries" issue, so I recognize this particular plight will be ignored by Fandom. Bottom line, though, RC with filters is a powerful tool that I do use, but RC without filters is harder to sift through than the old WA.

Since you mentioned wanting to know if admin WA usage is due to it being front and center, while RC is not... there is probably some truth to that. I use both, and it's certainly slightly more convenient to start with WA due to its prominent placement. If the placement were reversed and no other changes were made, I would still use both, though I might rely more heavily on RC than I do now. What would convince me to move off of WA altogether without being forced off? A toggle on how the edit list is organized. But I can't tell if that is an option that has been added to the new RC's filters because... well.

Anyway, WA is organized in a purely (reverse-)chronological order of edits. The old RC groups edits to the same page within the same day, so older edits sometimes appear above newer edits if there is an even newer edit to the same page as the older edits. Both of these ways of organizing the data have merits, and it is precisely this reason that both WA and RC are useful tools for me as an admin. Everything else being equal, the ability to toggle to chronological mode in RC would pretty much instantly obsolete WA for me.  Without that toggle switch, I would still want both, even if RC were the more convenient one to get to.

Aesthetically, I prefer WA over RC, but that's a relatively minor issue for me. While in an ideal world, both the tool and the product are beautiful, I'd rather have an ugly tool that works well to make beautiful things than a beautiful tool that can only make mediocre things.