Important Note: These instructions are not for PBworks Project Edition. If you see a black bar along the top of your own workspace when you're logged in, the notification settings are accessed in a different area. Click here to find out how to access your notification settings in Project Edition.
Email Notifications
Email notifications can keep you updated when pages of your workspaces change, get added, get commented on, or when new files get uploaded. Email notifications are only sent out when other users make changes to your workspaces. You will never receive an email notification for a change on a workspace that you make yourself.
Accessing your Email Notification Preferences
To access your email notification preferences, visit this page when logged in to my.pbworks.com with your email address and password.
https://my.pbworks.com
You'll be presented with a list of the workspaces you're a part of. Next to each workspace listed, you'll see a checkbox which allows you to enable or disable notifications for any workspace you are a part of. By unchecking the checkbox next to the workspace, you will disable notifications for that particular workspace.
Changing email notification frequency
To change the frequency of notifications being sent to you, you must first log in to my.pbworks.com. Then, at the bottom of the page, you'll see the following drop-down list which allows you to set the frequency of your notifications. Click the "Submit" button under the dropdown box to set your preference.
Selective notifications
Note: This feature is only enabled on premium workspaces.
If you're interested in this feature, but have questions about upgrading, please check out the Billing section of this manual.
On basic workspaces, notifications are sent in accordance with the user's notification preferences. Users can set notifications from basic workspaces to be sent never, right away, or from a number of time interval selections. These notifications are sent for all pages and file uploads, and users have no way to control which page edits are most important to them, and which ones are not.
In premium workspaces, even greater control is given to users about how notifications are sent. Users of premium workspaces can set certain pages to be their favorites, and then set their notification preferences to only send them updates for only those favorite pages.
Here's how:
- First, you must set which pages are important to you by going to the page in view mode, and clicking the empty star immediately to the left of the page title (see below):
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| Before clicking the star |
After clicking the star |
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Now, the page will show up in your list of starred pages. To see this list, click your email address in the upper right corner of the workspace page.
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Your list of starred pages will be shown, along with the information available in your profile.
Below that, you'll see the controls for the notification settings of the starred pages.
- Here, you can turn off notifcations on the workspace completely, by selecting "Don't send notifications." You can also choose to send notifications for all changes, or just the starred pages. Finally, even if you're only watching the starred pages, you can still be notified once when new pages or files are created on the workspace.
Troubleshooting Notifications
First, notifications are only sent for changes that other users have made to the workspace page. No notifications are sent for changes you've made yourself. By accessing the recent activity of the workspace, you can see if there are any changes that should have been sent to you that have not gone through. To see a complete list of the recent changes on your workspace, visit the "changes.php" page of the workspace you're using.
Secondly, changes to your notification settings can take time to adjust. For example, if your notifications were previously set to "Once an hour" and you change the setting to "Right away" that change will take an hour to adjust.
Finally, email services, if unaware that you are using PBworks, may inadvertently block our emails as spam. Before you contact Support regarding your notification problems, please check with your email service to see if the emails are being blocked or delayed. We can only assure that emails are being sent out, but we cannot guarantee that your email service will deliver them to you.
You can direct your network administrator to this link, which will provide some helpful information about the service that they can use to make sure our emails are delivered to you:
http://usermanual.pbworks.com/Guide-for-Network-Administrators
When contacting Support regarding notification problems, please provide the answers to the following questions:
- When did this problem first start happening?
- Which workspaces are affected by this problem?
- What users are affected by this problem?
- Have you contacted your email service regarding this issue?
- Have you ever successfully received a notification email from PBworks?
Administrative Notification Settings
If you have access to the settings of any workspace, you can completely turn off notifications for the entire workspace. This means that no matter what setting the user of the workspace has, no email notifications of changes will be sent out.
First log in to the workspace and access the workspace Settings. If you don't see the "Settings" link pictured below, then you do not have administrative access to the workspace.
When you access the settings, click on Notifications & RSS on the left hand side. Here, you can check and uncheck the options which allow people to receive email notifications or the ability to subscribe to changes through the workspace's RSS feed. Remember to click save when changing any of these settings.
RSS Feeds
What's an RSS feed?
RSS is a method for subscribing to changes made on your workspace so you can see what has changed more easily. Most web browsers include RSS readers, and generally show a feed icon somewhere near the address bar (the icon is orange in most browsers, but it's blue in Safari.) When you click this icon, you'll see a list of available feeds. Here's what that looks like in the Firefox browser.
Your PBworks workspace has a few feeds you can subscribe to:
- The Recent Changes feed includes all recent changes on your workspace, including page edits, comments, file uploads -- you name it.
- Each workspace page has its own feed that only includes edits and comments on that particular page
- Each folder has its own feed that includes edits and comments made to any page in that folder
Public workspaces and RSS
If your workspace is public, the RSS feeds will include only publicly visible changes. If the workspace is private, you will be prompted for your email address and password, and then all changes you have permission to see will be included. (Note that hidden pages are never shown in feeds.) You can take advantage of your public workspace's RSS feeds with any feed reader.
Private workspaces and RSS
Some online feed readers don't support password protected feeds like ours. These include Google Reader, My Yahoo!, and Bloglines. If you use one of these, unfortunately, private workspace feeds will not be available. However, there are feed readers that support your private workspace's feeds.
Recommended feed readers
For Windows users, Feed Demon (http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx) is a feed reader that supports your workspace's password-protected feeds. Mac users have their own solution, called NetNewsWire (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswire/default.aspx). You can find these and other free feed readers at NewsGator's collection (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/default.aspx). For public workspaces, we like using Google Reader (reader.google.com).
How do I get individual page RSS feeds?
Look in your browser’s address bar for the RSS icon (it usually looks like 
or 
). When you click it, you’ll get a list of available RSS feeds:
The second feed will be specific to whichever page you're currently on. Select it to subscribe to that page's RSS feed.
Why can't I view my workspace feeds in Google Reader?
Some online feed readers don't support password protected feeds like ours. These include Google Reader, My Yahoo!, and Bloglines. If you're currently using one of these, unfortunately, private PBworks feeds will not be available. However, there are readers that support your private workspace's feeds.
Recommended feed readers for private workspaces
For Windows users, Feed Demon (http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx) is a feed reader that supports your workspace's password-protected feeds. Mac users have their own solution, called NetNewsWire (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswire/default.aspx). You can find these and other free feed readers at NewsGator's collection (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/default.aspx).
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