Last modified: 2009-04-27 23:37:02 UTC
Many users (particularly at the English-language Wikipedia) like to display on their userpage whether they are online or not. For this purpose, they use ugly hacks such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Misza13/Scripts#statusChanger or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Topaz/statuschanger.js . These hacks work using subpages that people modify each time they change their status (see for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Omtay38/Status&action=history ) This seems to me a total waste of resources that would be advantageously replaced by a one-click built-in toggle button. There is no need for keeping an history about this, nor for using a wiki page for this purpose. An output would be needed to display this status somewhere on the user page.
Added OnlineStatus (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OnlineStatus ) extension for this. Now needs to be activated on WMF wikis :).
Thanks! Marking the bug as FIXED then. Whether it is activated on WMF wikis or not will be the subject of another request. Could you please provide some basic information about performance? I mean, for big wikis like Wikipedia or so, it is going to behave better than the current way it is done (i.e. one edit each time one changes their status)?
For some basic performance informations about this extension, it clears cache of user and user talk pages when preferences are saved to be sure that displayed informations are up to date. I didn't find how to see wich preferences are changed when SavePreferences hook is called (the one i use to clear the caches), so for now it clears caches at each preferences changed even if the status isn't changed. Maybe i can implement a feature to also pass old preferences to the hook. But changing status doesn't create a new revision, recent changes entry, ... and changes should be viewable immediately on user (talk) page as it doesn't need to wait for the job queue.
*** Bug 17218 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
