For those of us that need to maintain a mirrored version of a site's contents there seem to be only two methods currently available on WikiDot.
Watching the site and receiving the e-mails and then processing them either manually or using a program. According to Squak this is inherently an unreliable process because "Sometimes it happens that they are lost in the profound abyss of the Internet". This is unfortunately very true…
Going to your own account [[http://www.wikidot.com/account/activity|activity]] and seeing the activity of your watched sites. . This method looks to be limited to site's with low activity levels as it appears to not be amenable to processing under program control.
My wish is for an a method (users.get-activity ?) to be added to the API methods that would download the contents of the data that is used to generate the [[http://www.wikidot.com/account/activity]] page with possibly one parameter that would limit the download to those entries that occurred on or after a specific date.
Thank you for your consideration.
Later: A better option might to be able to access the source data used to generate [[http://fancyclopedia.wiki.com/system:recent-changes]] (system.get-activity ?) also with a parameter that would limit the download to activities that occurred on or after a selected date and time.
jack, you may want to rate up your own wish :)
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It is also possible to access recent activities through the activities XML feed. You can find the link and the credentials through: Site Manager > Notifications (3rd up on first section)
Kenneth Tsang (@jxeeno)
I believe that feed is only for notifications (membership invites, etc.), not all activity.
Maybe a similar feed for the "Recent Changes" list in Site Manager would be an easy gap-filler until API access can be added..
Community Admin
Ah, you're right… Maybe this is the right feed: http://community.wikidot.com/feed/site-changes.xml
Sorry, on mobile at the moment - cant check.
Kenneth Tsang (@jxeeno)
Thanks, this looked promising so I've been using it for a few days but I don't think that it will do the job. One reason I had hopes for it was that it includes the things that I do on the site which, for obvious reasons, watching e-mails don't, most users would probably not want them but it would be handy for me. The problem is that the download always consists of thirty (30) activities, probably the most recent ones though I've yet to investigate that. This is is useless to me because the Fancyclopedia site frequently has considerably more activity than that in any give day…
Jack Weaver Fanac Fan History Project
At least 994+ e-mails "lost in the profound abyss of the Internet" over a 7 month period (August 26,2012 - March 18, 2013)? Most of of the missed e-mails where for Tag only changes (only 2 had both Tag and Content changes and 1 had Content only) which may be significant. The 994+ is because many of the page's histories show multiple changes, sometimes several on the same day, that I never received notifications for. The total is probably at least 2-3 times that number.
Later: The 994+ quoted above is lite and the occurrence of missed revisions is not as bad as I thought. I failed to include the pages that API had problems with, that has been corrected. The numbers are now:
From: 03-23-2012 to 03-18-2013
Total Pages: 10,496; Good Pages: 9,463; API Errors: 0
Changed Titles: 0; Tags: 1,028; Content: 8
Skipped Pages: 1,033; Skipped E-Mails: 1,088
Skipped Revisions: 55; Pages with Skipped Revisions: 48
These numbers where generated by using API to download all the pages on the site and then comparing the "Updated" date/time against the local copy of the page and saving the ones that did not match. This was the only alternative to correct my problem that I have been able to figure out.
Jack Weaver Fanac Fan History Project