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 email shows the changes in unified diff format, a sample email is shown at the bottom of this page.

The subscription facility is controlled using the subscribers setting. It is turned off by default. The sender adress is set by mailfrom setting.

Note for wiki admins

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.

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

You can display the Subscription Management for the current page via the Manage Subscriptions button of the pagetool, right to your wikipage.

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 subcribed to the page or namespace it will show up in the overview of current subscriptions. A namespace subcription appears on the management page of all pages within it.

The current subscriptions overview has a Unsubscribe button.

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.

Below an example email for the mail on every change.

Hello!

The page sample_page in the Wiki Name wiki changed.
Here are the changes:

--------------------------------------------------------
@@ -3,18 +3,18 @@
  
  ===== Section Title =====
 
- (This is some example text)
+ (This is some different example text.)
  

--------------------------------------------------------

Date        : 2009/12/25 11:19
User        : sampleuser
Edit Summary: sample edit summary
Old Revision: http://www.example.com/doku.php?id=sample_page?rev=1246611477
New Revision: http://www.example.com/doku.php?id=sample_page

To cancel the page notifications, log into the wiki at
http://www.example.com/ then visit
http://www.example.com/doku.php?id=sample_page
and unsubscribe page and/or namespace changes.

--
This mail was generated by DokuWiki at
http://www.example.com/

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 command on a Linux system:

grep -rH ".*" *.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)

In either case, be sure to change to your data/meta directory first.

• It would be useful if the SuperUser could add arbitrary additional email addresses to a subscription. This would be useful in a situation where LDAP is being used for authentication and the superuser would like to subscribe a distribution group to page changes, rather than an individual user.
• It would be useful for the SuperUser to be able to select the default behavior of subscription. this way there would be one configuration when subscribers receive an email Unless the editor marks the change as trivial, versus another when the subscriptions receive an email only when the editor marks it as important.