Re: [Phpwiki-talk] RFC: EmailNotification Syntax and Features

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Adam Shand wrote:

>
> > RFC: EmailNotification Syntax and Features
>
> this is great, thanks for publishing this.

Yes, most excellent!

>
> >     NotifyAboutChanges:
> >
> >     * JoeEdelman
> >     * TheHumanResourcesDepartment
> >     * ji...@mi...
>
> i would vote to remove the email option, it makes it too easy for anyone
> to sign up anyone to get spammed on change notification.  having all
> notifications routed to a wiki page (and thus to an email) also provides a
> single point of maintenance for end users (need to change your email you
> just have to do it in one place).  if you remove the email meta-data (or
> maybe change it to a keyword like "disabled") it would also provide an
> easy way to temporarily unsubscribe.

Right.. we should bear in mind that people will want to set up a public
Wiki and only registered users can receive email notification.

Also... would it be possible to code for this scenario:

PamOne adds her name to NotifyAboutChanges.
Email is sent to PamOne to confirm.
If she confirms, OK; if not, no further mail is sent for that page, and
  possibly her name is removed from the page's list.

Also, users would need a form page telling them what they are subscribed
to and let them unsubscribe from any page (or all of them).

What I find enlightening about Joe's approach is sticking with Wiki markup
to do the job, in plain English (or pick your native language ;-) It's
incredibly simple and Wiki-like.

Also I think we may need (in the future) unbuffered output from the Wiki
when pages are saved... giving the user feedback as the engine does its
thing. I did this for the editing tools at the New York Times when I
wanted to get a lot of cruft removed from the system, but couldn't get
approval;  by letting the editors see what the tool was doing, they were
able to complain it was doing things that weren't necessary and I got the
approval I needed.

~swain


---
                  http://www.panix.com/~swain/
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring
production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
                     -- Frank Zappa