DokuWiki

It's better when it's simple

User Tools

Site Tools


subscription

Email Subscriptions

DokuWiki allows individual users to “subscribe” to page changes. When a page is changed by a user all other users who have subscribed to that page will receive an email describing the changes. The user changing the page will not receive an email.

Only logged in users have access to the “Manage Subscriptions” page tool (see screenshot below), it is not possible for anonymous / not registered users to subscribe. Note that DokuWiki's email subscriptions are meant as a collaboration tool, not as newsletter - for anonymous / newsletter-like change information supply DokuWiki offers an RSS feed, see XML Syndication.

Enabling Subscriptions

The subscription facility is controlled using the subscribers setting. It is turned off by default. You can turn it on in the configuration page of your wiki. Also, make sure to uncheck 'Subscribe/Unsubscribe' of disableactions in the authentication section of the configuration. The sender address is set by mailfrom setting.

Be careful in switching this facility on. In a busy wiki, with both frequent changes and many subscribers, emailing the changes to those subscribers can put a heavy strain on the webserver. In a public wiki it may also provide unscrupulous people with a way to send spam to your wiki's users.

Please also note that the subscribe feature is different from the notify setting. The latter works even when subscriptions are turned off.

RSS Feeds provide an alternative (and lighter) mechanism for receiving details of updates to the wiki.

Manage Subscriptions

You can display the Subscription Management for the current page via the Manage Subscriptions button of the pagetool.

To subscribe you choose between two kind of subscriptions:

  • The current page
    Where you can set notification frequency to:
    • email on every change
    • digest email of changes for each page (every 1.00 days)
  • The whole current namespace
    Where you can set notification frequency to:
    • email on every change
    • digest email of changes for each page (every 1.00 days)
    • list of changed pages since last email (every 1.00 days)

When you are subscribed to the page or namespace it will show up in the overview of current subscriptions. A namespace subscription appears on the management page of all pages within it.

The frequency of digest and list mails can be set through the subscribe_time setting.

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe you have to go the subscribed page or namespace, open the Subscription Management as described above and click on unsubscribe next to the subscription you want to remove.

To ease finding the correct entry point for unsubscribing you will find the link at the bottom of every subscription mail you receive.

Customizing

Subscription emails

The subscriptions emails are in the folder inc/lang/en with names beginning with subscr_. When you like to modify them, please copy first to conf/lang/en to prevent overwriting at upgrading. See changing localized texts for more information.

.mlist files

Using the Subscriptions will create files with the extension .mlist in the ~/data/meta/ folders and subfolders. In each .mlist file are the subscribed usernames.

If you have stored the Wiki on a Windows system, you can use the following command to have a look to all files and entries:

findstr /s "." *.mlist

You can likewise use the following commands on a Linux system:

grep -r ".*\.mlist$" 
find . -name "*.mlist"
ls *.mlist 

On a Mac (but I presume on a Linux system as well) the following statement works much better:

egrep -r --include="*.mlist" every\|digest\|list .

(every=notify on any change, digest=digest changes, list=list of pages)

Searching for all subscriptions of a particular user on OpenBSD or similar UNIX platforms, where grep does not support the --include option, can be done like this (for the user with the short name user):

find . -name '*.mlist' -exec egrep -n '^user ' {} +

In any case, be sure to change to your [wiki directory]/data/meta directory first.

subscription.txt · Last modified: 2023-09-25 20:15 by Klap-in

Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license: CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Donate Powered by PHP Valid HTML5 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki