Last modified: 2007-07-20 17:26:39 UTC
Where before the watchlist could be made to show changes as far back as 30 days, it now only can be made to show changes as far back as 7 days. This severely curtails the usefulness of the watchlist for anyone who goes for a week without using Wikipedia, which is a far greater number of people and a far greater number of instances than for those who would go without using Wikipedia for 30 days. This renders the watchlist almost useless for tracking changes for anyone who uses Wikipedia on a weekly basis, and forces anyone who wishes to track changes--the purpose of the watchlist--to check up on the pages at unnecessarily short intervals; that is, this effects even people who use Wikipedia on a daily basis but who do not want to maintain the pages on their watchlist every day.
I can view changes for the last 30 days. Your problem might be: * you hit the upper limit of changes (you can set this in Special:Preferences, with a maximum of 1000 changes); * or you didn't select the right option (did you click "all" beside "show last" at the top of Special:Watchlist?).
This must have been a fluke that occurred after the recent changes max age was changed. The watchlist timelength was truncated, but then extended back to 30 days as normal. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=141071265#Watchlist_timelength Anyway, it is no longer a problem.
