Phil Boswell:
Was this the set of changes which removed the
"offset" parameter from
[[Special:Whatlinkshere]]?
The new "from" parameter, which seems to
work on datestamps, is intriguing
but hardly conducive to "ignore the first N entries".
Can we have the "offset" parameter back,
please?
i think it's unlikely any "offset" parameters will be added in the future
(at least, i hope not).
the reason offset was removed from several pages (Contributions,
Whatlinkshere) is that it requires the database to search though every
entry to find the offset you want. a request for starting at a particular
record is much faster because it can be found quickly from the index.
k.
Right, we've known for a while about the poor performance of offset clauses.
The problem was fixed in several places already. I was doing some work on
Special:Whatlinkshere while I was working on templatelinks, and took the
opportunity to fix it there as well. Like Kate says, the offset parameters
are gone for good.
-- Tim Starling