[pmwiki-users] Fox mail features: feedback invited

Hans design5 at softflow.co.uk
Mon May 19 07:10:55 CDT 2008


Monday, May 19, 2008, 12:32:39 PM, Graham Archer wrote:

> Feedback from my users to date was that
>  it was quite difficult learning the concepts for foxnotify - but once understood it's o.k.

I can see it is difficult at first. Especially the email template
page, as the template is not quite the same as other template

>  From my perspective I would like users to have a simple way for
>  them to set up e-mail forms using fox,
>  but to have some kind of security/approval before these forms can be made active. 

I think the heart of security issues lies in the management of email
lists: how to control additions of email addresses.
Pmwiki notify is just using one page for this: Site.NotifyList
FoxNotify widens this to allow more than one page, but they need to
be in one group. For security reasons all email list pages in this group
should be read-protected to the public (they work just as well being
read protected).

>  I don't know how feasible/sensible this is, but something like the
> url  link approval, where when a new url is
>  put into the wiki it can not be made visible with the read
> permission until the url is approved by the wiki admin. 
>  Could this be made for the e-mail address too?

If users are allowed to add email adresses to an email list page
(FoxNotifyList page), for instance to subscribe to a newsletter,
and approval is needed, then I suggest to
1. read protect the list page
2. edit protect the list page
3. Set up a Fox form which lets a user add a provisional entry to the
list page, one which does not work till some small change is made:
Like instead of posting notify=name at domain to post tobeapproved=name at domain
4. Have a Fox form on the list page with which an admin can replace
tobeapproved= with notify= and thereby approving/activating the email
address.

>  Your idea of a FoxNotifylists group also works too, I guess the
> user has to "ask" for such an entry to be put on the list.?

see above. Depends how the pages in the email list group are managed.
But all this makes me think that it is good to have just one group
for email list pages, instead of allowing email lists or addresses to
be anywhere.

>  One further point, I noticed a "side affect" of writing to a page
> when sending the e-mail is that this is a very good audit/reporting
> trail. I can see how many and when e-mails were made - I quite like this feature!

This was born of the necessity that some page change had to occur
before anyone could be notified of the change.
The new (:foxmail ..:) markup does not need this though.
But still you could add also a (:foxadd ..:) markup to the form,
which lets you log any form submission, by adding an entry to some
Log page.

Thanks for your response, Graham! Very helpful!

  ~Hans




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