User blog:Jay Sea/How-to: The Page History Edition



'''Welcome to your personal crash-course on accessing and using page histories! Per the recent vote, archives will be going away, so this blog will help you effectively use page histories to save or view roleplays as needed. See the end of the tutorial for an important note regarding the fate of current archives on the wiki.'''

What is the page history? The page history is a full list of the date, time, size, and contributing user of every single edit made to the page - all the way back to the page's creation. How do I get to the page history? Great question! Click on the dropdown arrow beside the edit button at the top right of the page, and you'll see history listed as an option - just give that a nice click! Okay, I'm at the page history. Now what? So at this point, you'll be seeing quite the list. On this page, you are able to do a variety of things, such as narrow your search to a certain date range, compare the differences between certain edits, as well as change how many edits you see on one page. Those are all great tools, and you're welcome to explore those on your own, but they aren't what we want to focus on. Locate the edit you'd like to look at - you can ctrl+f to search the page by username, date, etc to find certain edits - and then click on the timestamp for that edit to view the page as it looked at that time and date. Now I've found the roleplay I was looking for - how do I save it? Every single edit has its own unique url, so you can copy and paste that into your sandbox, document, etc, or at the top of your current roleplay if you've had to clear the page to make more room! The roleplay I saved has missing templates! What do I do? That's okay! If the page looks like one of the images below, that just means that the templates have been deleted. The code for the page is still there, you will just need to access it. There is an edit button at the top right of the page - click that. You will then want to click on the source tab. Now you can read through the roleplay! I've read through the rp - but what's that notification at the top of the page? 'You are editing an old version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be lost.' When you are finished, DO NOT, I repeat,  DO NOT  click the publish button. Just close the page, click your back button to go back to the previous page.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or owl me! Archives will remain up for one week before we begin to delete those pages. Any non-roleplay archives will remain, and users are welcome to keep archives on private pages as well. If you would like private page archives deleted, contact me on Discord or owl me and I will delete them for you. If you need to save a roleplay from an archive page, you will want to copy and paste it to a different page. Page histories cannot be accessed once the page itself is deleted. If you need a page undeleted later so you can retrieve a roleplay, contact me on Discord or owl me and I'll help you with that too :D  page credit