Item10261: Moving a topic to another web should leave a trace in the source web's WebChanges, and a "put it back" link

Consider this scenario: you move a topic to another web, but a while later, you can't remember where you moved it. You head to the original web, can't find the topic there, and it's not in WebChanges either.

The problem is that the move gets recorded only in the WebChanges of the destination web, which you forgot.

I've reproduced this on foswiki.org running 1.0.9 by moving TopicWasMovedToAnotherWebTestLogging to TopicWasMovedToAnotherWebTestLogging. The topic is listed in WebChanges, but not in WebChanges.

Also, the destination topic doesn't have a record of the move, as TWiki has:

Development.TopicWasMovedToAnotherWebTestLogging moved from Sandbox.TopicWasMovedToAnotherWebTestLogging on 14 Jan 2011 by DanDascalescu - put it back

Our TWiki users found the "put it back" link very useful.

-- DanDascalescu - 15 Jan 2011

It is correct that a topic that moves web is only listed in the destination web and not the source web.

Personally I do not see this as a great problem. The WebChanges today lists the topics in the current web that has changed. I am not sure how you would make a user interface and a presentation in the source WebChanges that lists something which is not there. My first reaction to the idea is that it would be confusing with links pointing to another web, and a great danger of making the WebChanges presentation messy.

The message that says that the topic has been moved is not removed. It is moved.

Already back in the TWiki before the fork many users were complaining about the message being too much in your face.

Most renames of topics happen in the first hours or maybe days of the lifetime of a topic. A user creates a topic and regrets the name and renames it. And FORVER you have this silly message in your face. Only way to remove it is to delete the topic and recreate it. And then you lose the history.

So it was decided that we would move the message to a place where it is not in your face. Ie not on the presentation of the normal topic view.

The original idea was to show it on the history of the topic. But then we changed to using HistoryPlugin instead of rdiff and with that we got the presentation problem again.

The 1.0 versions did not have the Put It Back message for a while.

In 1.1.X the final solution in PatternSkin was to put the message in the "More Topic Actions" screen.

I think this solution is good. You have the possibility to put the topic back to where it came from.

I would like to hear other views. But personally I am happy with this solution, and again, I cannot see a good way of having a topic in WebChanges that is no longer there.

-- KennethLavrsen - 15 Jan 2011

I think Kenneth is right, having the moved.from in-your-face reminding you that a topic was once mis-spelt is annoying.

But I can sympathise with Dan's wish for more detail about where topics are coming from. I think what this needs is some investment in a UI to present the events.log to the user (obeying access controls of course). This could be a reasonably straight-forward plugin, perhaps, using the new logger API.

-- PaulHarvey - 15 Jan 2011

Might be nice to generate the Changes list from Store's .changes file / eachChangeSince API, instead of from SEARCH. It would probably be faster. Changing this to ProposalRequired

-- GeorgeClark - 06 Jan 2015

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