This page serves as documentation for the notifications service, containing info that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. See also About the notifications service and Get Notifications for more essential information information.
For information about the service's codebase, see the GitHub repository and the Technical FAQ.
If you have a question not answered by this page, contact me (Croquembouche).
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Table of Contents
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Unsubscribing
How do I stop receiving notifications?
You can stop receiving notifications by changing your notification frequency to 'Never'. You will effectively have unsubscribed.
You may also ask me to delete your user config page entirely.
Vocabulary
What is the difference between a 'notification' and a 'notification digest'?
A notification is a single indicator of a response to a single thread or post.
A notification digest is a message containing several notifications.
This service will collect all notifications from your chosen time period and construct a notification digest from them. E.g. if you have chosen 'monthly' as your notification frequency, you will receive one notification digest per month containing all notifications from that month.
What is a 'user config'?
A user config is the settings for a user's notifications, e.g. their language preference and subscriptions. See also:
Subscriptions
What is an 'automatic subscription'?
You are automatically subscribed to all of the following, and will recieve notifications about them:
- Threads where the first post was made by your account
- Posts made by your account
Use manual subscriptions to add further subscriptions, or to remove any automatic subscriptions that you're not happy with.
A note about page discussions: when a page is created on Wikidot, it has a corresponding forum thread — its 'page discussion'. Creating a Wikidot page won't automatically subscribe you to its page discussion.
To be automatically subscribed to that thread, you must create the first post in it. Otherwise, you must manually subscribe.
Auto-subscription to page discussion threads is a feature that may be added to the notifications service in the future.
What are manual subscriptions for?
You can subscribe to any thread or post and will receive notifications about new replies to it. A few reasons why you might want to add manual subscriptions:
- If you created a page but did not make the first post in the resultant discussion thread, you might wish to manually subscribe to that thread.
- If you are simply interested in being kept up to date with a thread that you didn't start, you might wish to subscribe to it.
You can also add manual unsubscriptions. These counteract an automatic subscription, preventing you from receiving notifications about them. A few reasons why you might want to manually unsubscribe from something:
- If you coincidentally made the first post in a page discussion thread, but it's not a page you care about, you might want to unsubscribe from it.
- If you started a thread whose replies you don't care about, you might want to unsubscribe from it.
Configuration
Where is my user configuration?
Right here. It is also linked to in the sidebar — 'Your user config'.
Will I miss notifications if I change my notification frequency?
No, changing your notification frequency doesn't affect what notifications you receive; only how often you receive a notification digest.
What languages are supported?
Notifications can currently be delivered in the following languages:
| Language | Contributed by |
|---|---|
| Chinese (Simplified) | |
| Chinese (Traditional) | |
| English | |
| Esperanto | |
| French | |
| Italian | |
| Japanese | |
| Norwegian | |
| Spanish | |
| Vietnamese |
The selected language determines the language of the notification digests. The documentation on this site, including this FAQ and the language of the user config form, is only available in English.
If you'd like to help out by contributing a translation, please see the entry in the Technical FAQ.
Receiving notifications
Can I receive notifications even if I have restricted my Wikidot inbox?
It can often be a good idea to restrict your inbox to just your Wikidot contacts or to users who share a site with you. This is possible through the 'Receive private messages from' setting in your inbox settings. However, this may prevent Notifier from being able to message you!
The following table will tell you what action, if any, you need to take in order to receive notifications from this service via Wikidot message, depending on your inbox restriction setting.
| Setting | Action to take |
|---|---|
| all registered | You can receive messages from anyone, including |
| co-members + contacts | You are a 'co-member' with |
| contacts only | You can only receive messages from your Wikidot contacts, so in order to receive messages from |
| nobody | You cannot receive any Wikidot messages, so you cannot receive notifications via Wikidot message. |
For any inbox setting, you may simply choose to receive notifications via email instead.
Also, make sure you haven't blocked Notifier.
Note that adding Notifier as a Wikidot contact will expose to it (and therefore to me,
Croquembouche) the email address that is associated with your Wikidot account. If this is not acceptable to you, do not do this.
When, exactly, will I receive a notification digest?
The notification service's scheduled tasks start at exactly the below times, all shown in UTC. Notification digests are generally sent out about ten minutes after the scheduled start time.
| Frequency | Schedule |
|---|---|
| Never | Never runs |
| Hourly | Runs at the start of every hour |
| Every 8 hours | Runs at 04:00, 12:00 and 20:00 UTC |
| Daily | Runs at 14:00 UTC |
| Weekly | Runs at 16:00 UTC every Monday |
| Monthly | Runs at 18:00 UTC on the 1st of each month |
You will not receive a notification digest if there are no new notifications for you.
Receiving notifications via email
How can I receive notifications via email?
To receive notification digests via email, you must first add Notifier as a Wikidot contact. This enables the account to see your email address without publicly exposing it to anyone else. You must then edit your user config (linked in the sidebar) and change your delivery method to 'email'.
Note that adding Notifier as a Wikidot contact will expose to it (and therefore to me,
Croquembouche) the email address that is associated with your Wikidot account. If this is not acceptable to you, do not do this.
Your email address is never stored offline. If you remove Notifier as a contact, it will immediately and permanently 'forget' your email.
What happens if I chose to receive digests via email but didn't add Notifier as a contact?
You won't receive any notifications.
There won't be any indication that anything is wrong — you might reasonably assume that there are simply no new notifications for you — so it's good to be aware of this before you choose to receive notifications via email.
An error message will be added to your user config page to let you know that something is wrong, so if you're not receiving notifications, try looking there.
When you fix the issue either by adding Notifier as a contact or by changing your chosen delivery method to Wikidot messages, your next notification digest will contain all the notifications you missed.
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Troubleshooting
I didn't receive a notification digest — why is that?
You won't receive a notification digest if there aren't any notifications for you. Keep in mind that you won't receive notifications for posts that you've already responded to.
If the notifier encountered a problem with your user config that prevented it from sending a notification to you, it may have updated your user config page to add an error message. If so, following the steps in that message should resolve the issue.
If you chose to receive notifications via Wikidot message:
- Check your inbox settings to make sure that
Notifier is able to send messages to you.
- Check that you have not blocked the account.
If you chose to receive notifications via email:
- Make sure that you have added
- Check your spam. If your notifications are being sent to spam, please let me know, as I have no other way of finding out about this.
Be sure to only expect to receive notifications for posts made to one of the supported wikis.
It's also possible that the notification service failed. You can check the service status page to find out if this happened.
If you know for sure that you were supposed to receive a notification, let me know by sending a Wikidot message to Croquembouche.
Supporting the project
How can I support the notifications service?
The notification service is free to use, but it does cost me money to run. If you'd like to help offset those costs, I gratefully accept donations via my Ko-Fi:
Otherwise, please help out by spreading the word about this service to as many Wikidot users as possible! It's most useful when more people know about it, so letting others know is a big help.
How much does the notifications service cost to run?
Expected costs for an application of this kind, with sensible and sustainable architecture decisions, would be about $25 USD per month. Through extensive optimisation I have been able to reduce this to about $4.50 USD per month.