Documentation?

[pm64]

This is clearly a great add-on that has required significant effort to produce, with the potential to be extremely useful. However, the documentation seems a little .. non-existent? After reading the project's readme.md, I'm still confused on a number of items:

• Are sites automatically scanned when added, or must they be explicitly scanned?
• Does the "interval" setting control how frequently the site is checked for changes? This doesn't appear to be the case -- I set the interval to 1 minute on my test sites, and no changes are being reported, even though the sites are changing.
• What is the recommended workflow? For example, say Web Page Scanner detects a change. What is the next step for the typical user?
• How are different scan results reflected in the UI?

Answers to the above would be immensely helpful for me, and I'd be more than happy to contribute to any documentation effort once I have a better understanding of this add-on.

[WaldiPL]

Sure, the readme file hasn't been updated in a while, and should contain more information.

• Pages are scanned immediately after they are added to the scan list.
• "Interval" specifies how much time must pass before a page can be scanned again. By default, the scanner is started every 60 minutes and one minute after the browser is started. The frequency of automatic scanner startup can be changed in the extension settings ("Frequency of automatic scanner startup [min]").
• Once the scan is complete, the pages on which changes have been detected are flagged, and the new content is saved in the database. Such a page is highlighted in the list (in the sidebar). Depending on your settings, it can be opened automatically or manually, by clicking on the selected page on the list, using the button on the toolbar or clicking on the notification (the latter option does not work in version 2.0.1 due to a small bug, I will fix this bug in the next version).

There are several colors in the scan list:

• blue background: page on which changes have been detected (not visited)
• green left border: page scanned, no changes detected
• red border and light red background: error, HTTP status code >404
• orange border: warning, HTTP status code 400-404

Colors on the page preview:

• cyan: highlighted changed element (using the interface on the right),
• yellow: changed element,
• light yellow: changed element related to the link.

[pm64]

Thank you @WaldiPL for this valuable info.

This clarifies things greatly, but I'm still slightly confused on the relationship between the "frequency of automatic scanner startup" and "interval" settings.

My understanding of what you're saying is as follows:

• "Frequency of automatic scanner startup" controls how often a page should be scanned, defaulting to 60 minutes. (If my understanding here is correct, then you might consider renaming this setting to "scan frequency").

• Interval "specifies how much time must pass before a page can be scanned again". The default here appears to be 8 hours.

• Therefore, even though "Frequency of automatic scanner startup" defaults to 60 minutes, a page by default will actually be scanned once every 8 hours, since the scan frequency is being limited by the Interval setting.

Is my understanding of the above points correct?

[WaldiPL]

"Interval" refers to a specific page. Each page can have a different interval set. If a page has an interval: 8h then even if the page changes before that time, those changes will not be detected (applies to automatic scanning).

"Frequency of..." refers to the main extension script. This is the period between scans. If this time is greater than the "interval" (e.g. interval=8h, Frequency...=12h) then the page will be scanned every 12h not 8h. This time is reset after restarting the browser. The first scan takes place 1 minute after the browser is started, the next scans after the time specified in "Frequency...".