Question

(Please also see CurrentStateOfEmailConsolidateNotification -- MattEngland)

I do not yet see how I can get auto-email-notification of TWiki.org topics I'm interested in or I have started. It seems like I need to track them some how and query them manually. Ugh. Is there a better way? Has TWiki.org not installed one of the email-notification plugins?

MediaWiki works so well with this...but I really don't want to go back to those folks. At first glace of their discussion group (and their rather rude response to one of my questions), I suspect they have little understanding of corporate requirements (like I think I need). On the flip side, I'm concerned TWiki may or may be on the verge of making a molehill into a mountain with: ConsolidateNotification

I'd recommend picking a simple, email notification for now, put it into the core, and expand or replace its capabilities later. Until that is done, I feel admins and users (since I'm being an admin for my own TWiki and a user of TWiki.org) like me are going to continue to suffer.

-Matt

For what it's worth, I like ConsolidateNotification and the requirements reconciliation process. I also think a quicker solution to solve the current email notification problem does not have to be mutually exclusive to ConsolidateNotification, whether it's jamming a plugin into DakarRelease, installing a plugin on TWiki.org as it stands, fixing/working around Sourceforge limitations, or something else (maybe even moving off of Sourceforge, which frankly has impressed me less then it used to). Any/all of this could happen presumably while ConsolidateNotification proceeds in ExplorationThenConsolidation fashion...unless there's something I do not understand? See more of my comments at CurrentStateOfEmailConsolidateNotification topic.

Whatever the case may be, I don't want to be a pain. I like what I see of TWiki, particularly the professional approach (I can tell that this group servers a corporate market--which is a good thing, imho).

However, I need info about particularly topics, and because I am running my own startup business, it's difficult to make the time to poll this site every day for answers or updates of any kind...and to hunt down every little topic I'm interested in, etc. Eventually, if I base my business on TWiki, the lack of TWiki.org email per-topic/subject/question notification will probably drive me absolutely nuts. I really don't know how others like me--are there any?--have dealt with it this long. Maybe your typical user is a dedicated IT corporate at a larger company (Yahoo, Motorola, SAP, etc) who does little else but read sites like TWiki.org...or get the email update that shows whenever anything changes in TWiki.org?

Does anyone have any tricks of the trade, workaround, alternative suggestions to help solve this problem?

The irony of it is that every other community that supports my "collaborative development" environment (Subversion, phpBB, Nucleus/MovableType/Wordpress, Mail2Forum.com, GNUmailman, others) have some form of email-notificatoin for support changes (albeit it's usually just an email list or a web-forum notify). Because of update-notificatoin problems, TWiki.org my get a bit of a black eye in my group...and in part because of this (and other factors as well) I will get pressure to use MediaWiki instead...whose email notify works just fine. But I'm trying to avoid this, because my "gut" (and I'll probably get some real data over time) is telling me TWiki is the way to go.

Ok, I promise, no more badgering on this topic. If we can figure out a work-around in the short term, that's great. If we can't, I'll deal with it.

Thanks again for your time...and creating such a great product. (An aside: I'll be trying to figure out how I can donate later.)

-- MattEngland - 07 Apr 2005

Environment

-- MattEngland - 06 Apr 2005

Answer

There seems to be a misunderstanding. TWiki had a built in e-mail notification from the beginning. There is also MailerContrib, an enhanced e-mail notification with a per topic notification.

TWiki.org's e-mail notification is currently not working because our current hosting provider SourceForge does not allow outbound smtp traffic from the web servers. The notification on your TWiki site should be up and running in no time if you follow the instructions in TWikiSiteTools.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Apr 2005

Unfortunately we've failed to even look at workarounds for SourceForge's outbound email flow not working. (Its been out of action for over a year and I now can't see this ever changing) This means its the TWikiAddicts (who check Codev everyday) will see such requests: people with a passing interest in a particular topic on TWiki.org have no way of getting notified. Our InterestedParties field is presently ignored by the notification system.

The ConsolidateNotification topic is a way for us to reconcile requirements. More about this on your CurrentStateOfEmailConsolidateNotification topic.

-- MartinCleaver - 07 Apr 2005