Re: Feature: Old page reminders?

[Trevor Boicey]

Baruch Even wrote:
> Trevor Boicey wrote:
> >   Would it make sense to have a feature in websec to email the page
> > anyways if the page hasn't changed in X days?
> >
> >   I've been running websec for a long time, and no doubt I am monitoring
> > a lot of pages that are just dead, but I forget about them.
>
> I've seen that suggestion before (possibly from you :-)

  Could be...

> Come up with a good way to not annoy the users and a patch and I'll
> incorporate it.

  I was thinking of a config item, I'll let you name it, but something 
like "ReminderDays"... default would be off, so it wouldn't annoy anyone 
who didn't understand it, but it would take an argument that would be 
the number of days a page can be stale before it sends out a reminder.

  I think a typical value for myself would be 180 days or something. 
Maybe 90 days, but certainly not much less.

  If the timestamp of the file is 180 days old (or a multiple of 180 
days old), and the file hasn't changed in that time, it would send the 
page again. Perhaps with a different title or a header to indicated why 
it's sending, so I didn't skim the page for changes that aren't there.

  At that point, I could decide that my URL is now wrong, or the page 
is just dead and I can remove it from my list.

  As an example of what this would help, I was monitoring a page that I 
just noticed was actually the FRAMESET page and had none of the dynamic 
content in it. So after months, I realized I hadn't gotten any updates, 
and went looking. Oooops. When I set it up the page didn't have frames, 
but they changed in there somewhere, I didn't fully realize the 
situation when I got the update that happened, and then from then on it 
was dead to me.

  I monitor about 100 pages, and no doubt MANY of them are dead but 
I've been checking them religiously every day for years.

  It's possible too that the page changed once to be a link to another 
page, I was snoozing and didn't pay enough attention to the WEBSEC page 
change, and that was my last chance, I'll never find out until I go 
through the pages by hand.