Add date range filter to staff action log export

In the meantime, here’s some notes from my experience today:

  1. a hidden site setting enables you to export files larger than the default limit of 48mb, so you can still download the staff action log even if it’s massive.
  2. mine was still too big to open as a spreadsheet offline, so I had to edit the csv to delete the rows I no longer needed. The formatting of the csv is not easy to deal with (timestamp is not first column) but it helped to search for date, e.g. ,2024-12-31 to find the first (or last) entry from year I wanted, select the next row and then shift-cmd-up (or down) to select the rest and delete.
  3. several log entry actions contain alot of data in the details column. I used the quick filter in my spreadsheet to find them and empty the details column. The offending actions were:
    • delete_topic
    • delete_post
    • post_edit
    • post_rejected
    • recover_topic
  4. Doing the above cut the file size down tremendously, making it way easier to work with.
  5. Sort order is in reverse chronological order, so I changed this to chronological order using the quick filter.