Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-14250-20191127235050/@comment-9605025-20191202210056

I am a bit confused now. Are we talking about projects or categories; the two are different. My answer was geared at categories and, as Tupka217 already clarified, "member" means page. From what I can gather, that is where most of the confusion has come from.

Adding pages to categories is not considered an edit to the category; it is an edit to the page. One reason is that you can use a category before creating its page. Using api.php in the manner I suggested retrieves a list of current members. If a page was removed from a category, it will not show in the query results. In this case, the method I presented will not give you accurate results. Instead, it will give you the earliest among those still in the category rather than the absolute earliest. I imagine (but have not confirmed) that re-adding a page is effectively the same as not re-adding it as far was the results of the query are concerned.

Adding a page to a category is part of that page's edit history and, as far as I know, is not tracked anywhere else. That is why Fngplg suggested searching the database dump. By doing that, you can inspect every single revision and determine which was first to use the category. The downside of that is that your database could be large and would require offline data processing (i.e. you can't do it in your web browser). What I have proposed can be done quickly in browser but is limited to finding the earliest among current members. Both methods are incapable of accounting for deleted pages.

Does that make more sense?

Which categories returned nothing?