Add a link to the timeline of a post

Question

For the past year I have been quite active on SO and a bit on meta, but I had never heard of the timeline of a post until today in a comment on meta.

There was an announcement by Jeff Atwood two years ago of this feature as "experimental". (Timeline for that question).

This feature was requested by a user half a year ago, answer: this exists, but the link has to be built manually.

I think this could be quite interesting sometimes and I would like to use this, but I will not do so if I have to build the link each time by myself.

This feature has existed for two years and is still "experimental"? Who is using it? Who knows about it?

My feature request: Implement a link in the posts to their timeline. I am sure this nice feature will be used.

Answer 1

I am happy to announce that a new and improved post timeline is now available to all users. It can be accessed by clicking the clock icon underneath the voting and favorite buttons that are located to the left of a question or answer.

Clicking on the button will bring you to the timeline page for the given question or answer. This page shows everything that has happened to the post.

A new feature here is that by default the timeline page will exclude daily vote summaries. Logged-in users will be able to toggle these on. This will hopefully make the timeline easier to use, especially when looking at posts with lots of post activity.

Some other small changes:

• Community Bumps are now properly attributed
• Delete votes are now visible to moderators

Request: If there are bugs to report or more feature ideas, please make new posts for them. They will be very hard to track if they are left on this post.

This feature has obviously been a long time coming, and we are happy to be able to release it now. Special thanks for getting this feature done goes to Josh Heyer (Shog9). Shog did all of the coding for this feature (on top of his regular CM duties). For this, and so many more things, we show our appreciation and admiration.

Answer 2

Good idea - really surprised nobody suggested it before!

I think the most fitting candidate for the link is the question time stamp:

Answer 3

Update 12/23/2015: The old timeline experiment has been replaced by a filtered version of the moderator timeline. Extensive use in day-to-day operations has shown this to be an attractive and utilitarian tool, and one likely to be maintained for the foreseeable future.

The old timeline was rarely used (by moderators or anyone else), and linking to it made little sense; we may revisit this for the new version however.

Answer 4

Well, here's a greasemonkey script that does this for you, and while I'd really appreciate an official link, this will do (for me, at least) in the interim.

// ==UserScript==
// @name          SOTimeline
// @description   Adds a 'timeline' link to Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow posts
// @include       http*://*.stackexchange.com/*
// @include       http*://stackoverflow.com/*
// @include       http*://*.stackoverflow.com/*
// @include       http*://superuser.com/*
// @include       http*://*.superuser.com/*
// @include       http*://serverfault.com/*
// @include       http*://*.serverfault.com/*
// @include       http*://askubuntu.com/*
// @include       http*://*.askubuntu.com/*
// @include       http*://mathoverflow.net/*
// @include       http*://*.mathoverflow.net/*
// @require       http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.4.min.js
// @version       1.1
// ==/UserScript==

$('.post-menu').each(function () {
    var shareLink = $(this).find('.short-link');
    var postId = shareLink.attr('href').split('/')[2];

    // add a timeline link
    $(this).append('<span class="lsep">|</span>')
           .append('<a href="/posts/' + postId + '/timeline">timeline</a>');
});

Screenshot:

Answer 5

In the context of things that kind of link would probably work better jammed into the sidebar as you're looking into the total activity of the post.

There currently exists a link to the lastactivity of the page so either pair it on by making the "active" label be a link, or slink a joint in below the "asked, viewed, active".

The links that sit under a post are so far mostly reserved for actionable items (editing, flagging, etc.) that peeking into a piquant timeline is not really in line with.

Answer 6

I'm also a fan (and frequent user) of the timeline feature. And while I'd (also) really appreciate an official link, I've come up with another rather simplistic (but pretty effective IMO) workaround in the interim (= while waiting for the status-deferred-tag to be removed).

Here are the steps I use to get to any timeline of a question, on any SE site:

1. Click on either of these links below a question:
   • the edit link, which will bring you to an URL like (for this question here) https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/126447/edit .
   • the edited link (if the question has one already), which will bring you to an URL like (for this question here) https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/126447/revisions .
2. Double click the last part of the URL (= edit or revisions), so that it gets selected.
3. Type timeline and hit enter.
4. (Optional) if you have defined a keyboard shortcut for timeline (eg: @tl) then just type @tl (which further reduces the effort required to type that timeline from step 3 to only 37.5% ...).

Note: The time it takes to complete all (3 or 4) steps should be somewhere around 3 to 5 secs.

Answer 7

I use this chrome extension - Stack Overflow timeline

Clicking timeline prints it at bottom. CTRL + Left click or Mouse middle click opens in new tab.