[pmwiki-users] Mail Post Manual Trigger

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-04-29  09:45 PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz is rumored to have said:
>Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>Well, I'm interested in it but I haven't happened upon a good mechanism
>>for handling page subscriptions.   Any mechanism we choose needs to
>>be mindful of not allowing email addresses to be easily harvested/revealed,
>>and preventing malicious/forged subscriptions.
>
>To prevent mail harvesters from working, it's enough to never display a 
>list of email addresses (unless, possibly, the user is logged in as 
>administrator or something).
>
>Preventing malicious/forged subscriptions could be done analogous to 
>mailing list subscriptions. I.e. the sequence of steps would be:
>1. The user enters john at doe.org into the input field for the mail address.
>2. PmWiki sends a mail to john at doe.org, saying something like: "Somebody 
>(probably you) requested that you be notified whenever page 
>http://bla.com/Group/Pagename changes. If that's the case, please click on 
>the link
>http://wiki.tld/pmwiki.php?action=subscribe?user=john@doe.org?auth=9642687595. 
>If you didn't subscribe, please ignore this email. Please report any abuse 
>to abuse at wiki.tld."
>3. PmWiki takes a mental note that it's expecting to get a confirmation 
>from john at doe.org with authentication code 9642687595; subscription 
>requests for john at doe.org with any other authentication code will be 
>silently ignored.
>
>Of course, once people can really log in, PmWiki can also store users' 
>mail addresses. Then, subscribing to a page could be a simple action link 
>(well, at least after the mail address given is verified).

A login system that stored email addresses is probably the only practical 
solution. Anything else gets very messy very fast.

How does a "subscriber" figure out which pages they are subscribed to? How 
do they cancel one or more or all subscriptions? How do they update their 
email address? What should the admin do when email starts bouncing? What 
does the admin do when the subscriber complains about being spammed?

These problems may not be big ones for private or limited audience wikis, 
but a public wiki could have thousands of users all watching different pages.

I really like the idea of having individual page watches for each user, but 
I can't think of a good mechanism to manage it.


Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668