Allow notifications of changes to dynamic macros in a page

Many pages in my repository contain includes, excerpts, metadata, rss feeds, jira reports, remote-html includes, sql queries, charts, generated confluence content (children, pagetree, contentbylabels, search macro). In fact, this is a power of confluence, to 'safely' assemble these varied data sources. Confluence is an excellent central point for the collecting, or confluence, of a variety of data sources required to make decisions. Kudos.

However, the concept of notification for end users is clear: IF THIS PAGE THAT I AM VIEWING CHANGES, let me know. I don't want to miss anything. Often the 'view' changes without the 'source' changing.

From a content provider, or page 'steward', the use case is different. IF THIS PAGES SOURCE CHANGES, let me know. This is important because a page developer might not need to do or check anything unless the source changes, they may not care about the view. This is what you currently implement well.

• • You need both levels of watching for each page for these two communities of users. ***

The 'page view notification' would also help enourmously for 'unit testing' and assessing the impact of upgrading a macro on a large site where you can't review all the content.

IN ADDITION: the 'view changes' button shows a 'diff' of the source, something that is obscure to many content readers, especailly for complex pages. Changes sometimes are not obvious (i.e. a small addition,

is added, but a huge section of the page appears or disappears). End users would prefer to see highlighted what has visibly changed on a page.

THESE ARE NOT EASY CHALLENGES when you consider you need to have a stored view for each user, and different users will see different views on any given page, but if you can overcome them you will further differentiate your application in this very competitive application niche. Even a partial solution that worked for most cases would be powerful.

• space watch overcomes this somewhat for small spaces and internal data like pagetree or children, however:
• this is more important that entire-space watches that are quickly unweildly, as a user wants to watch digested information suitable to their level of abstraction, not the entire repository. So watching a TOP PAGE is more common, under the assumption that important changes will trickle up. (indeed that is how we build our sites, using includes and excerpts to trickle high-impact information upward or laterally). The problem is the trickle is often automatic in the form of adding a label or moving a page to another branchin the heirarchy, rather than an actual change on the top page.