[Phpwiki-talk] Email Notification question

[Robert O. <rl...@pe...>]

Hi,

Here's a short version of my longer question: is EmailNotification
going to be implemented anytime soon? If not, I'll probably wind up
trying to write the code myself for our site, but if someone else
is working on it, and if it'll be available shortly, I'll probably
hold off.

Here's a longer version:

I recently installed PHPWiki at our company. I let a few people
at the company know about it, and we used it a lot for a couple of
projects for the first few days. After that, it sort of petered
out... mostly, we forget to check it.

What happened was that there were four of us on the Wiki, and
a few days went by where only I made Wiki postings. I kept on
checking the RecentChanges page, but no-one had posted anything
right away, and by the time they did, I had stopped going back
regularly to check to see if they'd posted. And by the time I went
back, they stopped going back, etc.

The problem, it seems to me, is that the Wiki is purely a pull technology.
And it's true that email is also a pull technology, but over the last
ten years it's essentially become a push technology, because
everyone checks their email, all the time. (You could call email
a virtual push technology).

If EmailNotification was implemented for the Wiki, I suspect (but
obviously don't know for sure) that our Wiki usage would shoot up.
We wouldn't have to remember to view the Wiki because we'd be
attaching the Wiki to our (effective) push messaging.

A side note here: I do find it interesting that the Wiki isn't enough
even for the hardcore Wiki lovers on this mailing list -- if it was
enough, presumably the mailing list wouldn't be necessary, because
you'd all be checking the Wiki regularly. When I started writing this
message, I had a choice of posting it on the Wiki or sending out email --
I chose email because it was the only way I had of guaranteeing that
the people I wanted to see the message, WOULD see the message! I'd like
to ask those of you who send email to this list: why do you send the
email instead of posting to the Wiki? Is it for the reasons I've given
above, or is there something else going on? It does seem to me that
if EmailNotification were available, this mailing list could cease
to exist.

Anyway. Is this in the works, or should I assume that I should start
hacking?

Thanks,

Robert Orenstein
Perforce Software