Subscribers are the people who asked to hear about your changes by email. Collecting them works on every plan. People join from your public changelog page. The public page is chapter 03. The dashboard has no way to add an address by hand, so the only entry point is that page.
Addresses are stored trimmed and lowercased, so the same address in different capitalization is one subscriber.
Confirmed and pending
A pending subscriber has asked to subscribe and has not clicked the confirmation link yet. A confirmed subscriber has clicked it. Pending subscribers get their confirmation mail and nothing else.
The three mails
Every mail comes from your project name over the changelog address at deploylog.dev. The sender is fixed and cannot be changed. So are the three subjects:
- Confirmation:
Confirm your subscription to <Project> changelog. - Welcome:
You're subscribed to <Project> changelog. - Digest:
<Project>: <Entry title>.
The confirmation and welcome mails always go out, on every plan.
Subscribing
Three cases, and only three:
- A new address gets one pending record and one confirmation mail.
- An address that is still pending gets a fresh confirmation link and the mail again. The earlier link stops working. There is never a duplicate record for one address.
- An address that is already confirmed stops there: nothing is written, nothing is sent, and the request reports the address as already subscribed.
The confirmation link works once. Clicking it marks the subscriber confirmed and retires the link. The welcome mail is sent on that first confirmation only, never again.
The digest
A digest is one email per newly published entry, sent to confirmed subscribers when that entry is published, carrying the entry's full body. It is not a periodic round-up.
The rules:
- The digest fires on the move from draft to published. A draft never emails anyone, and an entry that is not published sends nothing.
- Publishing an entry that is already published is a no-op: no state change, no mail.
- An entry emails subscribers at most once, ever. Unpublish it and publish it again and no second mail goes out. The one exception: if no email actually went out, nothing is recorded, and a later publish can still send that first digest.
- Only confirmed addresses receive it. Pending ones do not.
- If the confirmed list is empty, nothing is sent and the entry stays published.
- The digest is the one part of subscribers that checks your plan. Chapter 12 covers plans and billing. On Pro it goes out. On Free the entry publishes normally and no mail is sent at all.
Digest links point at your changelog page, anchored at the entry.
Unsubscribing
Every mail carries an unsubscribe link. It opens a page that names the project and waits for a click. Opening the page removes nobody; the click does.
There is no unsubscribed state. Unsubscribing deletes the person from the list. Subscribing again later starts over with a fresh confirmation.
A used or unknown link stops there too: the page still reports success and never shows an error, so a second click on the same link is harmless.
Mail clients that offer their own unsubscribe button use a one-click path instead, which removes the person immediately.
The subscribers page
The page is three counters and a list, nothing else. The counters are Total, Confirmed and Pending. The list shows each address, the date it joined and its status.
Remove asks "Remove this subscriber?" and then the person is gone. There is no undo.
No search, no export, no paging, no digest history. With an empty list the page says: No subscribers yet. Share your changelog page to get subscribers.
Feeds
A feed is the RSS and JSON form of your changelog, served at fixed addresses:
https://deploylog.dev/p/<project-slug>/changelog/rss.xml
https://deploylog.dev/p/<project-slug>/changelog/feed.json
Feed addresses always use deploylog.dev.
Feeds have no settings. The title is your project name followed by Changelog. The description reads Latest updates and changes for <Project>. The RSS language is English.
A version is the release label an entry carries; version numbers never appear in either feed. The entry type does: as the category in RSS, as the single tag in JSON.
Feed items link to each entry's own page at https://deploylog.dev/p/<project-slug>/c/<entry-slug>.