[Pmwiki-users] mail post per page

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sun Apr 25 07:53:21 CDT 2004


On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 08:31:56AM -0500, Eric Celeste wrote:
> > Anyway, I'll run it around in my head for a while and see what
> > I can come up with.
> 
> While you are running it around in your mind... I've had requests from
> authors of pages on our wiki to monitor their own pages, but only their own
> pages. They would like the ability, per page, to "subscribe" to
> notifications. I've left this on my back burner for now, but I thought I'd
> at least let you know it is a "desired" out there.

Yeah, this feature has come up several times.  One way to do this to allow
authors to add markup of the form

  =notify username at example.com

to a page which says to send email to username at example.com any time the page
is updated.  Note that it doesn't really allow subscription to entire groups--
just pages--and there's very little authentication involved (i.e., anyone 
could add any email address).  It can also be annoying to get lots of
sequenced emails for minor edits.

Another approach is Wikipedia's "watch lists", where a user can indicate
(usually linked or embedded in a user profile page) the sets of pages 
he/she is interested in watching.  It doesn't provide email notification 
when a page changes, but one can jump to the watch list to quickly see if 
any of the watched pages have changed.

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to have PmWiki periodically scan users'
watchlists and send personalized email notifications for pages that have 
changed, but note that this sort of approach might not scale to large
numbers of users and/or pages very well.

Just more thoughts,

Pm



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