12

Is it possible to see the full chronological timeline of a question including when comments were added or edits were made.

As best I can tell, at the moment you can only see the edit history of a question. What I would like to be able to do is see something like this:

13:00 - Question created 13:10 - Question edited 13:15 - comment added to question 14:00 - Answer submitted 14:30 - additional comment added to question 14:40 - comment added to answer

Is this possible / does it already exist???

(I hope this makes sense...)

Improve this question
4
  • Non-relevant comment added to question.
    – random
    Aug 15, 2009 at 11:47
  • 1
    why would this be useful? What need does it serve?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Aug 16, 2009 at 0:17
  • 1
    I was trying to follow how a particular discussion had evolved. What appeared to have happened was an answer was put up and marked as helpful, but then as the conversation evolved and other answers and comments were posted the original answer was no longer helpful and dropped down the list out of site. Based on the information attached to the original question and the accepted answer, I could not understand why the given answer was accepted. It was only after I scrolled through the full list of responses and mentally reconstructed the timeline that I understood why the final answer.
    – Sam
    Aug 16, 2009 at 1:52
  • 1
    In hind site, I guess what I was looking for was a more traditional threaded view of the questions, answers and comments to help reconstruct the conversation.
    – Sam
    Aug 16, 2009 at 1:53

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
19

Half a year later, Jon's answer isn't true anymore. There is an experimental timeline feature on the sites now. Being experimental, it's not part of the UI yet, but it's pretty much what you requested. It works like this:

http://stackoverflow.com/posts/QUESTIONNUMBER/timeline

I have a little bookmarklet set up to view the timeline of the question I'm currently looking at:

javascript:window.location.href=window.location.href.replace(/questions\/(\d+)\/.*$/,"posts/$1/timeline");
Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Thats fantastic. Thanks for the heads up. Its exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
    – Sam
    Feb 8, 2010 at 1:05
2

This isn't available within the web UI, but you could do it retrospectively with the data dump if there was something you were particularly interested in.

(I'm not sure whether the data dump contains deleted posts/comments though.)

Of course, if we ever end up with a Wave robot which spots all of these things happening, you'll be able to see the change history that way :)

Improve this answer
1
  • Thanks Jon. It was more of a general question, as sometimes following the conversation (so to speak) can be difficult with the different answers, edits, and comments.
    – Sam
    Aug 15, 2009 at 13:24

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .