Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200917191106/@comment-40517619-20200917193326

Feedback for Special:SocialActivity; cross-posting from the F/G server by request.
 * 1) The title should probably say "Social activity" instead of "Social Activity" (lowercase A) to be consistent with "Recent changes" and other pages, as well as because there is no reason for such capitalization.
 * 2) "Track the most recent changes to the wiki on this page." This is a copy of the RC message, and it doesn't really apply, the changes here are to the wiki's social features. Which aren't listed, so it's hard to say what specific features are included. A list of included features could help.
 * 3) There aren't any kind of filters to show specific types of events, hide bots, etc.
 * 4) There is no indication for what date ranges are included. There are also no controls for how many entries to show or how recent the entries should be. (I assume the above two are feature requests that may already be considered for implementation.)
 * 5) The icons next to the changes could use on-hover tooltips for desktop users to say what kind of event the icon corresponds to; I expected a tooltip to show based on my interactions with other desktop interfaces. It could improve desktop usability a bit and provide some guiding information. A legend like the list of abbreviations on RecentChanges could help. (In addition to the tooltips)
 * 6) Messages on a user's wall do not link the mention of the target user; might be useful to link it. In addition, could have an extra string to indicate that the user is performing an action on their own wall instead of writing the same username twice.
 * 7) The string for sending a message says the author "messaged   on  's wall". I think that's poor wording (like "messaged a message"; I believe the verb "message" takes the recipient as the object), though I'm not sure what's better. "Posted"?
 * 8) One of my major problems with the enhanced RC interface was the absence of a "hide older" button that allows to stop showing large numbers of reviewed and no longer needed changes (no longer needed for me). I solved this problem with a browser userscript (so that it works on Fandom/UCP, Gamepedia, Wikimedia projects, and maybe somewhere else), which was straightforward as the enhanced RC interface does allow to hide old changes if a URL parameter is specified. At the moment, the SocialActivity interface neither indicates that new entries are available (old RC downside) nor offers a quick link to hide old changes (which was the upside of the old RC interface for me). While the former requires JavaScript, the latter should be less heavyweight. (Though some JS wouldn't hurt? The tabbed interface may make people switch between tabs a lot in the belief it's a cheap/fast operation, while in reality it incurs a full-page reload, and the default enhanced RC uses some non-instant JS in addition to that.)