My email notification patch (see http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454 ) and the recently proposed enhancement (proposed by Chris Phoenix see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Email_notification_to-do_list#diff_link ) are quite close to the original proposal of Emmanuel Engelhart:
I propose to add a new feature, to improve our fight again vandalism. I mean a diff, for watchlist articles, between the current version and the lastread one. I need opinion about the feature ? and about an elegant technical solution too ? Emmanuel Engelhart [Kelson]
Proposed for Enotif is to have (in the email notification) diff link: In addition to a link to the latest page, include a link to the diff between the latest page and the last version the user saw.
What you already can have now, when you would use Enotif v1.2 Because Enotif already knows the exact time of a watched page change ( = when a notification is sent to each watching user), the page version just before that "Enotif sent" event is the last version which was actually(!) visited by the watching user. A green marker (introduced together with the Enotif patch) marks such watched pages having new (= not yet visited) contents. Just to say it again: the marker and the notification mails are only for watch listed pages, which page title are printed in bold, as you know,.
This feature (marker in Watchlist and Recent-Changes view is already built in Enotif v1.2 -- see the documentation pages http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Enotif .
Enotif v1.2 is already available for Mediawiki 1.3.5 (as a diff file or as a MediaWiki1.3.5+Enotif v1.2 tgz package). I migrated successfully and without problems that patch to the current MediaWiki 1.3.6 and will publish it with some small improvements as MediaWiki1.3.6+Enotif v1.3 this weekend, October 17, 2004.
Tom Gries Berlin