I have a feature request! I’d like to be able to export the staff action log and only need entries from the last year.
Currently the export includes the entire staff action log going back to the beginning of the site’s history, which produces a log file that is too large to export and also includes many years of data that I don’t need or want to look at.
The easiest implementation I think would be to simply add a modal that is displayed when you select the export button to specify a date range. There might be other filters as well that would be useful, e.g. to only include entries logging actions by a specified user, or only about a specified user, etc, but that is less important to me.
Down the road and separately we could also look at overhauling the staff action log UI to improve the filtering and display, and to provide the ability to export what you are currently looking at.
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In the meantime, here’s some notes from my experience today:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Doing the above cut the file size down tremendously, making it way easier to work with.
- Sort order is in reverse chronological order, so I changed this to chronological order using the quick filter.