Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists/Default expiry for watchlist entries

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Random proposal◄ Watchlists  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Default expiry for watchlist entries

  • Problem: Items added automatically to the watchlist stay there indefinitely.
  • Who would benefit: Editors wishing to benefit fully from Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Watchlists/Watchlist item expiration, due for release soon recently released
  • Proposed solution: In Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist, under Watched pages, replace the checkboxes by dropdowns or radio buttons offering time periods alongside the existing No and Forever options. Apply these values when watchlisting pages silently, and preselect them as the defaults when watchlisting pages via a dialog such as that below the edit box.
  • More comments: Some of us occasionally manually watchlist a page of interest permanently, but more often want to watch pages we just edited for a week or month in case of replies, reversion, etc. This is particularly useful for gnomes who make many minor edits.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Certes (talk) 17:07, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Discussion

  • I am glad to hear that Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Watchlists/Watchlist item expiration is coming. This proposal seems fine to me but I would know much better how I feel about it after I see how Watchlist item expiration is implemented. --Jarekt (talk) 20:21, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I wouldn't use this myself but I see a huge use case for it and find it odd that this was omitted from the implementation. — Bilorv (talk) 00:32, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I also find it odd that it's not possible to set default expiry times, at all or by type. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:11, 2 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • One more thing: if a page is already watched, the time period suggested should be the longer of the existing watch duration and the default. I'm not sure (and don't mind) exactly how this works with (say) 15 days of a 1 month watch left where the default is a week; leaving the existing watch period would be one good solution. Certes (talk) 16:42, 9 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • (Added after close) English Wikipedia editors may wish to install a script to fix this omission: w:User:Rummskartoffel/auto-watchlist-expiry. Certes (talk) 13:20, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting