A great way to stay involved with content on MDN that you care about is to subscribe to pages, so that you're notified via email when the pages get changed. Every page on MDN offers a button (its icon looks like ) offering options to monitor the page (and optionally its subpages) for changes. To access these options, hover over the Watch button to disclose the Watch menu, which looks like this:
Then choose the option specifying whether to watch only that one page or that page and its sub-pages, as described in the following sections.
Subscribe to a page
To subscribe to a single page, simply hover the mouse cursor over the Watch menu to display the Watch menu as described above, then select the first option, "Subscribe to Page Title". Once you've done this, each time a user makes a change to that one page, you'll get email describing the change.
Watching many pages
Choosing the second option in the Watch menu, "Subscribe to Page Title and all its sub-articles", will register you to receive email for each change made to that page as well as all of its sub-pages. This includes sub-pages added after you requested the subscription, so if more sub-pages are created in the future, you'll get notifications for those as well.
Unsubscribe from a page
If you eventually need to unsubscribe from, or stop watching, a page, open the Watch menu again, and see that the "Subscribe" link has changed to "Unsubscribe." Click that, and you're unsubscribed!
The page change emails
Each time a change is saved to the page, you'll get an email. These emails come from [email protected] and are sent to the email address you used when registering your MDN account. Each message has a title of the form:
[MDN] Page "Page title" changed by username
The message starts with a repeat of the information in the title, then presents a standard diff of the content, showing exactly what changed. The changes are shown as HTML source code, which can be a little weird to read if you're not used to it in the context of MDN.
After the diff itself comes a list of useful links that you can use to act on the change in some way, including:
- View the MDN profile of the user that made the change
- Compare the previous and new versions of the page using MDN's on-site history feature
- View the article itself in your browser
- Edit the article
- See the article's history
At the end of the email you see text telling you what subscription generated the email, such as "You are subscribed to edits on: HTML element reference and all its sub-articles", as well as a link you can click to unsubscribe from the messages for this watch request.