Last modified: 2008-03-15 03:10:26 UTC
I have been looking through the user creation log in order to discover possible sockpuppets of a vandal I have blocked, and discovered that I can't go more than one day into the past: offset values over 10000 don't work; instead, clicking on "next 500" repeats the same page. (Artifically changing "limit=500" to "limit=5000" in the URL does display more users, so this can't be caused by a software limitation that older users are no longer in the database.) To reproduce: 1) View any log with over 10000 entries. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=Mike+Rosoft&page= - log of my admin actions. 2) Add (or replace) "&offset=10000" in the URL (or, if you have a lot of free time, go to that page manually by repeatedly clicking on "next 500"). Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=Mike+Rosoft&page=&offset=10000 3) Now click on "next 50" (or "next 500", etc.) link; it'll display the same page instead of going further into the past. Switching from Mozilla Firefox to Internet Explorer made no difference, so it can't be a browser bug either. Mike Rosoft
This is due to $wgMiserMode. The way logs page is not efficient, and high values use up a lot of resources to query. I suppose timestamp paging is in order.
I encountered this today, and would encourage someone to fix it. I was trying to review someone's deletion log and 10000 deletions only got me back to this September, which wasn't long enough to get at the question I wanted. (Of course it must be rare to have 10,000 deletions in 6 weeks, but it apparently does happen.)
Also, timestamp offset actually is useful when trying to link pages to it, whereas the links for the current method are unstable.
See bug 5446: Allow timestamps to be used as offsets in log pages *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 5446 ***
