Last modified: 2014-11-17 10:34:47 UTC
AFAIK there is not way for a user to set their preferences so that they continue to receive e-mail notifications of changes to the pages on their watchlist, even if they do not visit the page after the most recent notification. When I get notifications, they are accompanied by messages like this: "There will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless you visit this page." and this: "Note that additional changes to the page "User talk:Sue Gardner" will not result in any further notifications, until you have logged in and visited the page." This makes me crazy: it's terribly user-unfriendly. I have a lot of pages that I monitor, and every time I receive a notification I worry that if I don't visit the page afterwards while logged in, I will never be notified again. (For example, I am not logged-in on my phone. If I receive a notification, I will often visit the page immediately from my phone, but since I am not logged in, the system will not realize I've done that. So I need to remember to visit *again*, from a logged-in computer.) The system seems to have a strong built-in assumption that I do not want to be notified, and it requires me to continually reaffirm, by visiting the page while logged-in, that I do indeed want to continue receiving notifications. I think this is the wrong bias. If I've put a page on my watchlist, and requested e-mail notifications of changes to the page, I think I've made my preference clear, and shouldn't need to continually reaffirm it. I would love to see this changed, such that once I have requested e-mail notifications of changes to pages on my watchlist, I will continue to receive notifications of all changes to all pages on my watchlist until I request otherwise. Thanks!
Similar thought here. Additionally I think any link we send in an e-mail expecting the link click to reaffirm should contain something like ?forcelogin=1 to ensure that the user does not visit the page and think they've reaffirmed when they haven't. Or perhaps some sort of ?wlaffirm=token instead so the user doesn't actually have to login.
Indeed, http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3c87ty6k1v15.fsf%40jidanni.org%3e
(In reply to comment #0) > AFAIK there is not way for a user to set their preferences so that they > continue to receive e-mail notifications of changes to the pages on their > watchlist, even if they do not visit the page after the most recent > notification. > > When I get notifications, they are accompanied by messages like this: "There > will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless you visit this > page." and this: "Note that additional changes to the page "User talk:Sue > Gardner" will not result in any further notifications, until you have logged in > and visited the page." > > This makes me crazy: it's terribly user-unfriendly. I have a lot of pages that > I monitor... Sue, I designed that this way end of 2004. Otherwise, for example, returning from a longer leave and checking your mails, your mailbox will be flooded with thousands of mails (see Confluence-Wiki: this wiki can only mail for _every_ change). But your requested change is technically possible. Regarding bandwidth of servers, internet, and server load, I have doubts if such an option can be allowed for the mass user. This option should be bound to users with a new permission "permission-enotif-can-opt-in-every-change-is-notified" Technically, in /includes/UserMailer.php the check for 385 // Build a list of users to notfiy (s/notfiy/notify) ... 395 'wl_notificationtimestamp IS NULL', is to be ignored for such users who opted in for a to-be-implemented option "Send e-mail notification for every change on pages I watch", whereas setting the flag should be done as usual to keep track of time when an enotif has been sent: // Update wl_notificationtimestamp for all watching users except 404 $dbw->begin(); 405 $dbw->update( 'watchlist', 406 array( /* SET */ 407 'wl_notificationtimestamp' => $dbw->timestamp( $timestamp )