User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The first Unified Community Platform release is now live for NEW wikis/@comment-25653892-20200313001608

I've been trying to keep up with these blogs but this particular change came out of left field for me, apologies if it would've been more useful to have given my two cents at a more flexible time in development. Sorry also for the length of this comment.

I appreciate the effort to make Recent Changes more powerful to use, but I'm already missing what Wiki Activity offers, a clean landing page and feed that lets me navigate recent edits and posts at a glance. I've specifically avoided using Recent Changes because it's such a greater cognitive load.

All the information on each edit is on a single line, and there's no spacing or horizontal dividers between lines. The timestamps aren't working as a bullet-style delineator for me. It looks like a massive, inscrutable wall of text, with no clear hierarchy from a distance. This is far less friendly and accessible.

I sincerely hate to act like an armchair web designer when the closest I do is write inline CSS on wiki articles, but I believe my apprehensions are well-founded. There was an outcry when Discord made a similar update to their message display, which also diminished spacing and removed horizontal dividers between posts. Many people said they were no longer able to use the service because of it. While I was able to get used to it, and I'm sure I can get used to this, it won't be an easy or intuitive transition.

I think there are a few other readability tweaks that could be made, like bolding the name of the edited page, slightly highlighting the background of an entry on hover, and expanding the pressable area for the collapsed group arrows. (edit: Apparently bolding the page name is already done for followed pages.)

Another advantage Wiki Activity has is that it visually shows when images and categories have been added to a page. This also makes it much easier to judge the content of an edit at a glance, without having to view the diffs, which even then are also presented in plain wikitext. If you don't find it worthwhile to re-implement this from the updated version of Recent Changes, though, so be it.

To try to make this all constructive, my feature request is to add a cozy/compact view selector to Recent Changes. I think this could combine the best of both systems.

Cozy would split the already displayed information (page name, editor, section edited, edit summary, new page content, tag, etc.) across multiple lines, with ample whitespace and horizontal dividers between entries. Unlike Wiki Activity, this view would also benefit from the filter feature, which I largely like.

Compact would look similar to the current design, with a few tweaks like a smidge of whitespace between entries, and bolded page names. Far be it from me to demand much more major changes in this view and throw Recent Changes users into the reverse of my situation.

I hope you take this all into consideration in one way or another. The new profile and editor look great, but I fear they'll be overshadowed if the feed of edits to the wiki becomes non-trivial to parse.