01148: option to filter duplicate entries in e-mail notification

Summary: option to filter duplicate entries in e-mail notification
Created: 2009-10-07 11:33
Status: Open
Category: Feature
From: Frank
Assigned:
Priority: 25
Version: 2.2.5
OS:

Description: Similar to PITS 00676, I suggest creating an option to purge notification messages by deleting multiple edits on the same page by the same author, thus keeping only the last edit.

While we administor geeks sometimes do appreciate fine grained information about user-interaction: If it comes to engaging actual wiki users into editing actual non-computer-related content, citing every single edit in the notifications turns out to be counter-productive, especially as content experts tend to use multiple edits rather than the preview (and you can't enforce too many etiquette rules at once, either)

The way I do it in my own version of notify.php is probably not the most efficient, but it was a quick fix that worked for me... so if anybody would like to implement something like this (maybe as an option)...?

I have introduced in notify.php

  function dedup($var) { #delete earlier entries of same page and same author
    global $Author, $pagename;
    $aut = strpos ($var,urlencode(" {$Author}:"));
    $page = strpos ($var,urlencode(" $pagename "));
    return (!$aut || !$page);
    }

and call it in function NotifyUpdate before $nnow = time(); last in foreach($nlist as $n){...}

     foreach($mailto as $m) {
       $notify[$m]=array_filter($notify[$m],"dedup");
       $notify[$m][] = $item;
     }

P.S. cookbook: It is already possible to include such a modified notify.php as cookbook recipe, while keeping the built-in version disabled.

Frank

What happens if the author has added different change summaries while saving the page? Should we display the first, or the last one? (I forgot that the default Notify makes it difficult to use the summary in the e-mails) --Petko October 07, 2009, at 04:07 PM