Short description
The email notification feature is great. But it could be improved by sending a user a maximum of one email per page until they either visit the page or click on a link in the email. This link would take them to a page that displayed all the diffs including new diffs since the email.
Example: suppose I get email saying that FooBar has been updated. Then it is updated three more times before I visit FooBar. If I then click on the link in the (only) email, it shows me the diffs from all four updates.
MediaWiki has this feature.
Alternatively, MoinMoin could send a digest. But that would require some kind of transaction scheduling and mail cache.
Discussion
Its very bad for SoftSecurity. Imagine this:
10:00 GoodUser edits (you ignore, he is known to make good edits)
10:01 BadGui Spam
12:00 BadGui Spam
14:00 BadGui Spam
18:00 BadGui Eggs
20:00 You visit the page - you wish you got that spam diff 10 hours ago
Also, why not just use an RSS reader on the RecentChanges pages? I use RSS to monitor the whole wiki and email notification for pages I'm especially interested in (and so don't mind receiving an email with each change).
- I'm using Moin on an intranet where spam doesn't exist. So this feature could be a configuration option that is more attractive for intranets.
RSS is a good option, but many more people are familiar with good old email, and most people don't want to monitor the whole wiki.
Does this mean no diffs in the email? I do use email notification for changes on pages I am especially interested too. I like to see the text. Did you have checked the set bookmark on RecentChanges. Do you want this behaviour probably for some pages? An individual RecentChanges for subscribed pages? -- ReimarBauer 2006-01-17 21:05:28
The email just has the first diff. When I click on the link to the page, that shows me all diffs since I last went to the page.
- The email can also have a link to Info with a bookmark showing me the last version I've visited. Then I can choose to see each individual change, or just the current state.
- I don't mind having the same behavior across the entire Wiki.
- Preferences should allow me to get:
- one email for each change (the current behavior), or
- one email until I visit the page or the associated Info.
How should this behave when a page is renamed? Keeping the stuff with the page isn't really good for storage, keeping it with the user isn't possible since pages don't have unique IDs. -- JohannesBerg 2008-03-27 14:34:15
Project size estimation
ThomasWaldmann guesses that this is a 50% GoogleSoc2006 project, as it includes implementing some queueing system, system and user configuration plus good end-user level documentation about how to use it. Another problem is how to trigger sending out the notification without relying on some external cron job. So maybe this needs implementing some simple moin-internal "cron", distributing the tasks to do over multiple requests somehow.
AlexanderSchremmer thinks that this is a 30% GoogleSoc2006 project and could be handled in less than 100 physical lines of code (not including the config option and the documentation :-)).
- (please add your SOC size guess here)