Watch Settings

Each watch has its own settings, opened with the gear icon on the watch row in your watches list. The settings dialog holds four things: Monitoring Mode, Screenshot Capture, Check Interval, and Ignore Rules. Pausing and renaming a watch happen on the row itself, not in this dialog — see below.

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Check interval

Override the global check frequency for this specific watch. Pro includes 10 fast slots for watches below its 10-minute default: The interval is a target, not a guarantee. Site Spy fetches any single site at most once a minute across all your watches, so a fast interval on many pages of the same domain is spread out rather than run in parallel. After a server restart, watches are also queued gradually for the first couple of minutes.

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Screenshot capture

Toggle screenshot capture on or off for this watch. When enabled, Site Spy saves a PNG screenshot alongside each text snapshot, allowing visual diff comparisons. Enabling screenshots switches the watch to a browser-based fetcher that renders the page with JavaScript before capturing.

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Browser

Controls how the page is rendered before Site Spy compares it. The panel appears wherever you set a watch up: beside the element picker when you create one, in the chat picker, and in the watch’s settings. Check from — which proxy the check goes through. Most accounts have only Default; the list fills in when proxies are configured. Wait time — how long to wait after the page loads before reading it. Use it for pages that fill themselves in after load. Applies to browser checks only, and is capped at 60 seconds so a slow watch cannot tie up a worker. Disable JavaScript — renders the page in the browser with its scripts turned off. Useful when a script rewrites the part you care about on every visit. The watch is pinned to a browser, since the option means nothing without one. Block ads and cookie banners — blocks ad and tracker requests, and strips ad elements, cookie consent banners and newsletter popups from the page, using the EasyList and Fanboy filter lists. This is usually what to reach for when a watch keeps reporting changes you did not ask about. Defaults to your account setting in Noise Reduction; switch it per watch to override, or use Reset to follow the account default again. Mobile view — checks the phone version of the page: a phone-sized viewport, mobile pixel ratio, touch support and an iPhone User-Agent. Also pins the watch to a browser.

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Ignore Rules

Three filter fields let you control what gets monitored. See CSS & XPath Filters for syntax and examples.

• Monitor Only — CSS/XPath selectors to limit monitoring to specific sections
• Exclude Elements — CSS selectors for elements to remove before checking
• Text Patterns — Text or regex patterns to ignore

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Pick it on the page instead

Below the Monitor Only textarea, Pick it on the page instead opens the watch’s stored snapshot and lets you click the element you want followed. You get the selector without writing one, and it is checked against the page Site Spy actually stored, so it cannot silently match nothing. That screen also asks to replace an anchor before overwriting it, and it carries the other way of narrowing a watch — naming the message shown while you are waiting, so nothing is sent until that text disappears. See Choosing What to Watch.

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Re-tune filters

Below the filter fields, Re-tune filters asks Site Spy to analyze the watch and write filters for noise specific to that page — live counters, rotating promos, and other churn no generic rule can predict. The sparkle button on the watch row does the same thing without opening settings. You do not need it for the two most common cases: relative timestamps and view counts are stripped by Noise Reduction, and ads and cookie banners by the Block ads and cookie banners toggle in a watch’s Browser settings. Both are deterministic and cost nothing. See Automatic Noise Repair.

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Pause and resume

Click the pause button on the watch row to stop checking it. The watch stays in your list but no snapshots are taken until you resume it. Useful for temporarily disabling a watch without losing its configuration. Site Spy also pauses watches on its own — after repeated unrecoverable failures, or when a watch is over your plan’s limit. A watch paused by the plan limit cannot be resumed until you upgrade or remove another watch. See Watch Health and Billing.

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Title

Double-click the title on the watch row to rename it. The title appears in your watch list, notifications, and RSS feeds.