[pmwiki-users] email notification of page changes (watchlists)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sat May 27 08:11:05 CDT 2006


On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 01:00:01PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
> I see one problem with it: it doesn't play well in an environment with 
> user-based authentication. Mail notifications are configured through a 
> single page that needs to be editable by everybody with read access to 
> PmWiki (configuring mail notifications should be roughly equivalent with 
> read access after all). In a wiki where not all users are trusted 
> equally, this isn't feasible.

False, false, false.  Quoting from my first post in this thread:

    What if we have someone who wants to watch only a certain set of
    pages?  There are several ways to do this.  First, we can specify
    a trail with pages to be watched:
    
        notify=bob at example.com trail=Profiles.Bob
    
    This sends Bob email notifications only for pages listed in the
    trail at Profiles.Bob.  This makes it easy for Bob to adjust the
    pages he's interested in by simply editing the Profiles.Bob page.
    
    This also means a wiki administrator can control who is allowed
    to receive notifications (by restricting editing of the Site.NotifyList
    page), while still allowing non-administrators to maintain custom
    watch list trails.

> So *if* there's user-based authentication, *and* users have personal 
> pages, PmWiki should take the watch list off that user's personal page 
> (if every user gets a group, it could be taken off the user's NotifyList 
> page).

I believe this is already contemplated by entries such as:

    notify=bob at example.com trail=Profiles.Bob
    notify=dave at example.com trail=Dave.NotifyList

which allows Bob and Dave to maintain their watch lists in their personal
page(s), and doesn't require edit permission to Site.NotifyList.

All that we need is a secure way of adding entries to Site.NotifyList,
which for the moment is done manually by the wiki administrator.
But even with manual maintenance, the ability to create custom
notify lists is a huge improvement over what we had before.

Eventually the addition of entries to Site.Notify list can be done
by forms that verify recipients' email addresses prior to adding
an entry to Site.NotifyList.  Again quoting from my earlier message:

    Also note that this is just the first step of the overall plan I wrote 
    in http://www.pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/2006-March/023990.html .
    At some point in the future we can add features to obfuscate email 
    addresses in the Site.NotifyList page, forms for adding and verifying
    email addresses to that page, links to add pages to watchlists, etc.

Pm




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