robchur wrote:

Page newness, as recorded in the recent changes table, doesn't last forever.

kellen wrote:

Is the limit based upon table size or age?

robchur wrote:

Item age.

kellen wrote:

Am I correct in assuming that there is some efficiency reason for generating
Newpages in this fashion rather than querying the creation date for the article?
If not, could we just make Newpages into a reverse-chronological listing of page
creation? Is there some other way to get such a listing? It would be
particularly useful for cleaning up new additions to wikibooks after the fact as
we do not have a dedicated newpages patrol.

robchur wrote:

(In reply to comment #4)

Am I correct in assuming that there is some efficiency reason for generating
Newpages in this fashion rather than querying the creation date for the article?

The fact that we don't store the creation date in the page record. So yes.

If not, could we just make Newpages into a reverse-chronological listing of page
creation? Is there some other way to get such a listing?

The NewestPages extension sort of does this.

If this is a problem, then perhaps the max age can be bumped. If not, then there isn't much to do. 31+ day old pages aren't very "new" though.

Perhaps just up your $wgRCMaxAge and run rebuildrecentchanges.php...

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #6)

If this is a problem, then perhaps the max age can be bumped. If not, then
there isn't much to do. 31+ day old pages aren't very "new" though.

"New" is subjective, and will depend on how fast they're coming, which is why the concern appears to be small wikis.

Current on Wikimedia wikis it's set to 30 days:

$wgRCMaxAge = 30*86400;
( https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=CommonSettings.php )

Which overwrote the MW default of 7 days as of MW 1.4.0 ( 7 * 24 * 3600 )

As of 1.16.0 the default is 13 weeks (about three months)
$wgRCMaxAge = 13 * 7 * 24 * 3600;
( https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_16/phase3/includes/DefaultSettings.php?view=markup )

Perhaps we should up this on WMF wikis as well ? Or make the default 13 weeks and lower it on the major wikis back to 30 days (presumably due to table size).

$wgRCMaxAge is 30 days on live cluster which should be enough for most projects.

Since the original requester talked about en.wikibooks.org and that project got much more activity nowaday, I am assuming 30 days is enough for this project. Thus I am closing this bug.

If any project need this value raised, feel free to open a new request to raise it.