Follows and notifications
Following is a server feature, like comments. The DocuCommit editor (desktop app) has no follows, no notifications, and no inbox. Everything on this page happens in the browser and in your mail client.
You have to be signed in. The Follow button only appears for an account.
What you can follow
The Actions panel on the right carries a Follow button, which reads Unfollow once you are following. It is on three kinds of page:
| Page | You are told about |
|---|---|
| A document | that document |
| A section | every document directly in that section |
| A project | every document in the project, at any depth |
On a section, before you follow, a checkbox appears next to the button:
☐ Include subsections
Tick it and the follow covers nested sections too, not just the documents sitting directly in the one you are on. The checkbox is only offered while you are not yet following — to change your mind, unfollow and follow again.
Follows overlap harmlessly. Following a project and one of its documents does not double anything up; each notification is sent to you once.
What sends an email
| Event | Who is emailed |
|---|---|
| A comment is posted on a document | everyone following that document, its section, or its project |
| A reply is posted on a thread | the author of the comment being replied to |
An @mention resolves to a user | that person, follow or no follow |
| A sync brings in new commits | followers of every document whose text changed or that is new |
Two rules keep the volume down. You are never notified about your own comment, and each comment produces at most one email per person — a mention outranks a reply, and a reply outranks a plain follow.
Document-change notices are tied to a published change reaching the server on its next sync. When a scheduled pull or a webhook actually brings in new commits, the server compares the library before and after and mails the followers of each document whose body differs. Deleting a document sends nothing.
An @mention that does not match a known user is silently skipped — the comment posts, but no
mail goes out. See Comments and mentions for how
handles resolve.
Immediate or digest
Notification settings live at /notifications/settings — Notification settings, Manage email
notifications for the documents and sections you follow. There are two controls:
- Email notifications — the master switch, on by default. Turned off, nothing is sent to you at all, mentions included.
- Delivery — Immediately (Send each notification as it happens.) or Digest (Batched every 15 minutes.). Immediately is the default.
Save settings confirms with Notification settings saved.
The digest window is server-wide, not personal: docucommit.notifications.digest-interval,
15m by default, and the settings page shows whatever the server is actually configured with.
Choosing Digest collects your notifications and sends one email per window, subject
DocuCommit digest: 3 updates, listing each item with its link.
[!NOTE] There is no link to the settings page anywhere in the site navigation. Reach it by URL, or by the Manage your notification settings line at the foot of any notification email.
Setting up sending
The server only sends mail when spring.mail.host is configured. Set that and the rest of the
SMTP block — see Configuration for every variable.
Without SMTP the feature still runs. Follows are recorded, mentions resolve, notifications are built and appended to an outbox file, and a line is written to the server log — but no mail leaves the machine. The outbox is written either way, so it is a record of everything the server decided to send, not a queue of things waiting to go out. There is no retry: an SMTP failure is logged and the message is not attempted again.
Set docucommit.notifications.base-url too. Without it the links inside emails are
site-relative paths rather than clickable absolute URLs.
Where follows live
Neither follows nor the outbox are in your Git repository. Both are JSON files in the server’s working directory:
<workdir>/.subscriptions/subscriptions.json
<workdir>/.outbox/outbox.json
They are part of a full server backup and not of a content backup — see Backup and restore.
After each sync the server re-homes document follows whose document moved, matching by slug. If exactly one document with that slug exists in the project, the follow moves with it; if two documents share the slug, the follow is left alone and stops firing.
What notifications do not do
- Emails are plain text. No HTML, no styling, no one-click unsubscribe — a summary line, a link, and a footer pointing at your settings.
- There is no in-app notification centre. The server has a settings page and nothing else: no bell, no unread count, no list of what you were told about. Email is the whole delivery mechanism.
- Cadence is per person, not per follow. You cannot have one project deliver immediately and another batch into a digest.
- Pending digest items are held in memory. Restarting the server drops whatever was waiting for the next window. Sent mail is already gone; queued mail is not.
- The editor knows none of this. No notification of any kind reaches the desktop app.