One feature I'd really like to see is per-topic notify reports, especially as I know in my firm that not everyone is interested in all the topics in the web and so would be reluctant to subscribe to WebNotify.

Perhaps we could build a list in the meta data of each topic set of subscribers interested in that subject. This list would by default contain the list of contributors but people could add or take themselves off using a button "(Un)subscribe to topic".

Some mechanism would need to be built to avoid duplicate entries.

-- MartinCleaver - 28 Sep 2001

Version 1 by ShawnBradford

I have just finished working on a way to do this. It was one of the things that is very desirable and a feature that should be actively being developed. Well let me explain my approach.

Note : I needed this right away to help out people at work so there are a few things that probably need to be worked out, but we have a working version

As starters every topic that you want to have a subscription service to will need a page very similiar to WebNotify but will be named $topicWebNotify . The syntax will be exactly the same as the WebNotify page. I actually copy and pasted the exact wording in out distribution.

The mailnotify script will then look at every $topic that has change and look for the $topicWebNotify file associated with it. If none exist than no topic emails are sent. If one does exist it will send out email to those on that particular list that $topic has changed.

The email will look very similiar to what you are already receiving from the mailnotify script.

I needed to modify the mailnotify script to a greater degree in that I needed to add a processTopic subroutine. This does all the topic emailing.

I also needed to modify a small portion of the TWiki.pm script when it parses the emails for a particular page. It was defaulting to WebNotify and the capability to use another page was there but it did not seem to work right. I made a slight modification to it such that it performs as I would imagine it should.

Well I hope it might be useful. The modified files are attached.

-- ShawnBradford - 23 May 2002

I updated the mailnotify script to the latest release (Dec 2001 code) and put in the new changes. I also provided a diff file for reference using the following command :

• diff -c oldfile newfile

After updating the TWiki.pm code to the latest release it makes my previous modification obsolete, they seem to have found the problem and fixed it. I can not remove the attachment though. Currently I will just try to hide it.

-- ShawnBradford - 23 May 2002

Version 2 by JosephWasson

I've recently added something similar. My implementation started similar to the one ShawnBradford did, but I ended up doing everything in WebNotify. The idea is a person can subscribe to only certain topics or can subscribe to all but certain topics. It's completely backwards compatible with the old mail notify format, as well (old mailnotify will treat everyone as global subscribers).

The changes include a new function added to TWiki.pm and a large change to mailnotify. There is a diff of both TWiki.pm and mailnotify as well as the complete mailnotify in the attached zip. This is based on Dec 2001.

Also add the following to WebNotify: If you wish not to be notified about changes to specific topics use the following format:

3 spaces * %MAINWEB%.yourWikiName - yourEmailAddress - topicsToIgnore separatedBySpaces

If you wish to only be notified about changes to specific topics use the following format:

3 spaces * %MAINWEB%.yourWikiName - yourEmailAddress + topicsToBeNotifiedAbout separatedBySpaces

-- JosephWasson - 05 Jun 2002

Hi JosephWasson, I would like to implement this feature. But I am not familiar with perl and hence I am not able to make use of the diff files. I used the mailnotify in the attachment in the attachment and tried fiddling around with the Twiki.pm as I could. When I run the script 'mailnotify', it gave the error:

Undefined subroutine &TWiki::getRenderedVersion called at mailnotify line 79.

Can you please help ?

-- ChengappaCB - 24 Oct 2005

If you're using Dakar, please check the documentation of MailerContrib on how to get notifications for specific topics. If you're using Cairo, I suggest you install said contrib

-- RafaelAlvarez - 24 Oct 2005