Ignore previously seen text

Help and Support
1

Hi,

I have recently moved to Distill from Changedetection because I need something that has a quick browser to monitor changes on a website.

I monitor a stock website which is behind a login which has a a page of about 50 products (and multiple pages after that).

Stock isn’t regular and sometimes they may add the same product but under a new product ID. If an item sells and there is a layout shift, a previously seen product will come into the page and I get a notification. Good stock sells within seconds and if 10 products get added, I may get 10 notifications within a minute but all I want is the initial notification.

Is there a way to ignore previously added/seen text? Thank you!

James

2

@jamesgrant Yes, Distill does have a way to handle exactly this kind of “noisy alerts” scenario.

You can use the condition:

Text → doesn't match any previous text

This condition checks whether the newly detected text is different from anything seen before in the change history.

This is particularly useful for dynamic lists like stock pages where items move around or reappear.

After setting the condition, make sure to use the “Test conditions” button .

  • If Final result = True → notification will be triggered

  • If Final result = False → notification will NOT be triggered

This helps you confirm that the condition behaves as expected before relying on it.

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3

Thank you. I had looked for this before and totally missed it! I think because its not in alphabetic order but no problem, hopefully all sorted now!

I am happy to raise another topic on this but I was just wondering, I do have an alert set up for keywords but the notification shows all the products, not just the keywords products, is it possible to change this too?

4

@jamesgrant Just to confirm, are you referring to conditions set with keywords, where alerts are triggered only when those keywords appear?

If so, the current behavior in Distill works like this:

  • The monitor tracks the entire selected element/section

  • When a change happens, the change history shows the full monitored content, with updates highlighted (typically in green)

  • The alert is triggered only when your keyword condition is met, but the notification itself will still include the full monitored content, not just the keyword-specific items

So in short, keyword conditions control when alerts are sent, but not how the content is filtered in the notification.
Let me know if you are talking about something else.

5

Thank you. That is exactly what I meant and the results you described is what I”m getting. It would be a nice feature that the URLs for high priority keywords were the only things sent through, so I could quickly click them rather than having to scan a list.

Another great feature would be on the Distill app would be to have critical alerts so sounds override silent mode and you can have different sounds for different alerts. I’m currently using Pushover to facilitate this but alas the Distill app formats the text much better.

6

@jamesgrant Thank you for the suggestions — those are very thoughtful and practical use cases.

I’ll make sure to pass these ideas along to our product team for consideration. If they see strong demand and feasibility, they may include them in future updates.

In the meantime, it’s great to hear you’ve found a workaround with Pushover.

If you come up with any other ideas or improvements, feel free to share — we always appreciate user feedback like this.