Question

This is a feature request that expands on the behavior discussed in this bug report ^[1]. In the original report, we concluded that the merged entries in the activity tab were because they were nothing but retags done by a 500 reputation user.

Upon further research, I've discovered that in actuality, any revision will be merged into adjacent revisions as long as the edit summary is the same. This is what ultimately causes this behavior for the 500 reputation retaggers - they can only leave an edit summary of "edited tags" when doing this because they can't leave their own edit summaries ^[2]. But it doesn't matter whether the edit summary is "edited tags" or something else. For example, I did two vote ^[3] question ^[4] retags for the same reason. But in my activity tab, it looks like the following.

Only one entry with "Genericase" as an edit summary, despite two in immediate sequence

This was still just retags, so I decided to do some more testing. After doing a simple tag fix with a certain edit summary ^[5], I found a second post that I could edit the body and title, but not need to change the tags ^[6]. I did a partial edit with the same edit summary. So for a moment, my activity tab looked like the following.

The retag is no longer listed, just the edited body and title

And when I completed the edit within the 5 minute window, changing the edit summary to something more appropriate, we end up with this instead.

The retag is now listed again because no more recent adjacent entry with the same edit summary!

If it just collapsed things that were identical in the nature of the edit (just retags, for example), it'd be somewhat acceptable. I can live without being able to keep a super-convenient record of all the retags I just did in a row.

But this can collapse completely different kinds of edits just because they are described the same. And when you do a series of revisions on posts because of certain reasons (like, updating info based on new announcements or removing deprecated tags as I've seen other users doing), all of those revisions will be condensed into a single entry.

Can this merging system be removed?

[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/46384/activity-tab-on-profile-only-the-last-retag-is-listed
[2] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/49871/allow-retaggers-be-able-to-leave-a-summary-in-the-vein-of-an-edit-summary
[3] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/38834/allow-new-users-to-vote-on-answers-theyve-received-closed
[4] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/41652/cannot-vote-at-all-but-can-edit-tag-etc
[5] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/52850/show-revision-number-on-area51
[6] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/52852/why-do-all-stack-exchange-sites-have-to-be-on-such-focused-topics

Answer 1

As of the implementation of the new Activity History that splits into multiple categories, this has been fixed. Revision summaries, be they automated or manually input, will no longer be merged together if they are old.

I took a while to report this because I could not confirm manual messages within my own history, as my examples had been split between sites in the interrim. By glancing at Peter Mortensen ^[1], whom I know to have written the same text with regards to the usage of the Stack Overflow name, I have discerned that this is the full case and it is retroactive.

[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/63550/peter-mortensen?tab=activity#apage_7-afilter_revisions