User talk:Enterprisey/section-watchlist

Scripts++
do you want me to leave a note about Wikipedia talk:User scripts in the next Scripts++ issue? --DannyS712 (talk) 18:59, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , yes, that would be wonderful! Thanks for reaching out. Enterprisey (talk!) 04:28, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * No problem, will do DannyS712 (talk) 13:52, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

2020-09-24 restart
All users (well, that's just me and at the moment, looks like!) will have to log in, but looks like no data was lost. (Only scrambled...) Enterprisey (talk!) 07:45, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

November 2020 update
Down for now. Been having some stability issues, and there sometimes aren't any errors in the logs when it dies, which makes the issues harder to troubleshoot. Will of course keep trying, as I do want this script to be actually useful! Enterprisey (talk!) 10:45, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I just came across this (and the unfortunate history at Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Watch only a section of a page or of a talk page) – I hope this succeeds, since section watchlisting would be so incredibly useful! &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 20:37, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

glitching
Hey, Enterprisey! Been using this without incident for a couple days. This morning when I tried to watch a section, the script made me "reregister" by going to OAuth. Then when I later clicked to view the section watchlist, it made me do that again. Then just now, it made me do it again, but when I did the section watchlist was blanked. I looked at the toolforge page and it still said 'Hi' so I guess that means toolforge was not down? —valereee (talk) 12:03, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * And it just now let me 'watch' two sections, but they aren't showing up on the section watchlist. —valereee (talk) 15:46, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I've been rebooting the server a lot lately, and that'll wipe some edits out of everyone's inbox sometimes (I'll fix that later) and will also force everyone to "reregister". There will also be a fair number of display bugs, but I'm working on getting those fixed too. Watched sections will only show up in your watchlist once someone (possibly you) edits them; I'm planning to add a list of every section you watch soon. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:46, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Great, I just wanted to report in case it was helpful! —valereee (talk) 13:07, 10 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Calendar dates are hinky today; maybe just one of the display bugs you mentioned. —valereee (talk) 17:09, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Why would it forget stored watchlists; is there no database on the backend?! If not, how is all the data being stored? – SD0001  (talk) 08:24, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Just a JSON file. I'll make it use SQL at some point, certainly before I declare it "in beta" or start advertising it more widely. Enterprisey (talk!) 01:30, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Also don't discount the reporter. I have no idea what I'm doing. :) —valereee (talk) 01:38, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

The elephant in the room
Now to ask the really dumb question: have you considered rewriting the backend in PHP and making it a MediaWiki extension? Pros: (i) the production-grade Kafka can be used directly instead of the less reliable EventStreams API; and the production databases instead of the less reliable ToolsDB (ii) duh, no one would need to install a script or gadget! Cons: (i) ugh, Rust need to be replaced with PHP.

Might make for a good project grant proposal similar to 's work on a global watchlist. – SD0001  (talk) 09:41, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's definitely necessary if we want any sort of widespread usage of this. (Although I recall they've deployed Node services before (albeit temporarily), so I wonder how open they'd be to Rust in production.) I don't know a lick of PHP myself, so of course we'd need a willing PHP developer. One would hope the WMF could spare someone, given how popular this feature request is. Before that, at any rate, I would like to finish adding features and working on the diff parser, although I don't think I'm under any time pressure here :) Enterprisey (talk!) 09:05, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * @Enterprisey if you want, I can *try* to look into how this would work in PHP (please ping when replying) --DannyS712 (talk) 03:57, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , sure, go for it. I do anticipate making more changes to the backend, though, but no major architecture rewrites. It does make me a little sad that I won't be able to contribute to the backend any more (well, without learning PHP), but at least more people will be able to use it. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:25, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It appears that "topic subscriptions" are being worked on as a feature for DiscussionTools extension (T263820). This would be only for talk/discussion pages – though that is probably the only big usecase for watching sections. – SD0001  (talk) 16:25, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
 * That looks awesome! I don't really think section-watchlist is that urgent anymore due to that "topic subscriptions" work (see also Talk pages project/Notifications, for any onlookers), so I'm pausing development/operation. Enterprisey (talk!) 04:24, 16 April 2021 (UTC)