Question

Is there a way to specify email notification of individual topic changes? I am imagining a huge main web with many users, and that each user will only ever really want to track 3-4 of the topics at once. If a user signs up for the whole web, they're going to get an email listing many changes every hour. I saw some code snippets in http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/ImmediateWebNotifyPerTopic, but it doesn't appear to be in the code I downloaded. Obviously, making this change won't be too difficult for me to make, and I am happy to make it, but I expect that I would continue to track releases, so if the change didn't get added to the main codebase, I would have to re-apply it with each update.

• TWiki version:TWiki20010315beta
• Web server:Any
• Server OS:Any

-- NathanArthur - 01 Jul 2001

Answer

Notification per topic is not (yet?) in the code base.

You can do these things instead:

• Set the notification to 6 hours or 12 hours to reduce the noise.
• Use the Main web only for users, groups and offices. At work (Wind River) we have over 500 registered users and only some admins subscribed to that web.
• Use group specific webs.
• Tell the users to subscribe to relevant webs. If they are only interested in a few topics they can define a mail filter. Pseudo code:
  • If subject contains "Automated notification of topic changes":
    • If body contains "InterestingTopic" or "FavouriteTopic" then move it to TWiki notification folder,
    • Else mark it as read and delete it.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Jul 2001

Is this still not in the code base? For the usage I envisage, it is fairly important.

For one example -- far from the only one -- suppose I want to collect data asynchronously from a team, and need to know when some new data has been entered. An example of this is a table of all the scheduled vacations on a team. In a team of 10-20, there may be a vacation change every week or two or even less, but when it happens I want to know immediately. E-mail is not the answer, since I also want the table updated and viewable by everybody. So it really makes sense to have everybody just update the table themselves.

The e-mail filter will certainly do the trick, but seems rather klunky. For one, I simply do not want to subscribe to the whole web, as it will generate a ton of mail, most of which I just don't want. This seems contrary to the anti-spam spirit of the times, and doesn't scale well. For another, setting up filters is a bit of a nuisance, though I do it all the time. There could be many of them; it makes this into a double operation, once on the server and again on the client, and they have to be coordinated; notifications can change all the time, again with double, coordinated updates; they are not portable if I ever change e-mail clients (I've probably already lost that battle); etc.

Actually, this question is a perfect example of another use. I'd like to know when it is answered! But I certainly don't want to either see all changes in this web, nor have to set up a filter for this one-time or few-times event.

Thanks. -- DavidJLewis -- 06 Mar 2004

OK, I see this has been addressed with ImmediateNotifyPlugin. Sorry for the bother.

-- DavidJLewis - 06 Mar 2004

Or, has it been addressed? I cannot tell from that page if it addresses individual topics as well as entire webs.

-- DavidJLewis - 06 Mar 2004

Hi. Has there been any update to this topic? We're a potential (scratch that, probable) user. We're brand new to the whole WIKI concept, but its starting to gather a real groundswell of excitement here as the solution to a number of long-standing issues. But one of the big issues we would need to address is per-topic notification, ideally by a method that is simple to use and easy for the user to control themselves. Our product is extremely customisable (sic?) and our end-users may have FAQ or solution topics that are unique to them. We'd really like to host these, but we'd need to set it up so that they can track only those topics (easily - the email filter option would be too clunky for them)and not be subject to a load of 'noise' - ie updates on everything else.

I'm also not clear from either the MailerContrib article or the ImmediateNotifyPlugin whether this is possible. Can anyone help?

Ps - Just as a general btw on my first post - TWiki looks fantastic and I'm very excited about using it!

-- SimonKnaggs - 16 Mar 2006

With current TWiki releases TWikiRelease04x00, per topic notification is possible indeed.

As of today, twiki.org is still running the 2004 release, so you might want to have a look at http://develop.twiki.org/~develop/cgi-bin/view/Bugs/WebNotify. It has a couple of nice examples of how to restrict notification to a topic, a list of topics, or to a certain link depth, or ...

-- HaraldJoerg - 16 Mar 2006

That looks fine - we can sort that out from there by the look of things. Thanks Harald.

-- SimonKnaggs - 16 Mar 2006