Poor subscription management - Page 2

Why is my Subscription list not sorted by date used, as virtually all other forums I belong to. Is there an actual setting for it? Date Used sorting makes it a lot easier to decide which ones to delete, etc.

You can choose how to sort subscriptions.

This page? http://www.avsforum.com/users/subscriptions/index/view/threads

Mine is sorted by most recent reply.

-Bill

The sooner the better! I'm missing out on posts, because I can't go to the site from work - that's why I had thread subscriptions...I hope this gets fixed soon.

Can you describe what is broken about the above screenshot?  The only thing I'm seeing is that some threads are missing the number of unread posts.  I replied to your email - go ahead and forward me the actual notification and I'll look at it.

No I don't regularly follow all of these threads - generally I stick to the administrative areas of AVS.  What I meant about the missing "unread post" area is what you just reiterated above, however, including the "going to the first post of long threads" bit.  I just got your forwarded examples and sent those over to the Product team to see what logic is behind this behavior, and if in fact it is expected behavior at all.  I'll post here when I hear back.

Are we ever going see separate subscription updates by forum, instead of the jumbled up mess we're currently getting? Or is this "improvement" here to stay?

So I checked in about this, and I can confirm that this is not intended behavior (which is good because I couldn't make any sense of it, myself).  I did find out that these digest emails are actively in the middle of being redesigned.  I don't have an ETA on that as it's always a bit nebulous as it's tested, but it's in development now and this issue will be addressed as a part of that.  

I don't know what all is being changed or reformatted or in what manner - I'm primarily concerned with bugfixes, myself - but I'll be happy to update if I have more info passed along to me during the process.  Thanks for the helpful examples.

I want to add my voice to the chorus on this as well; I find the new subscription digest format worthless and would strongly prefer the old full text digest back. Hopefully we'll see that update soon!

I wish this thread was longer. 42 posts makes me think this issue isn't as annoying to others as it is to me.

The way the update notifications come now is stupid and much inferior to the old way, where if I choose daily updates, what I got was an email for each thread with all the posts from that day. I too can't always visit the site from work and also often find myself without internet service (on the subway), but being able to read the emails is my way to keep up with my threads.

I hope this "feature" gets attention in update because it's actually quite stupid and annoying. I'm all for updates and change, but going backwards is never really a good thing.

honestly I like site only:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/newposts/filter/participated

It is very annoying to me.

Would it be possible to have links bring us to the appropriate post number, rather than at the top of the page? It's very annoying to wade through the same posts to find where the new ones start.

eg. link to http://www.avsforum.com/t/123456789/some-thread/1234#post_12345678

I know they're working on subscription notifications, but I haven't heard any details yet.

Any progress on getting email subscriptions to something like the previous software? I find the daily digest is still pretty much totally unusable.

It's my hope that some of the programmers that were working so hard on mobile out are now available for search & subscription notifications.

I agree, very unusable.

SEARCH is next after Mobile (Which has done very well.) and so you know, SEARCH redesign has already gone though a beta round. Then I think Subscriptions are on deck. At lest that is what I recall the order was.

Add me to the list of people for whom this change was a massive regression, rendering the forums essentially useless.

Especially if there were other missing/broken functions considered even more important, the new software was clearly not ready for prime time.

The longer it takes for the broken 'subscriptions' function to be fixed, the more likely it is that I (and probably other people) will feel that it's not worth the effort to catch up on busy threads. After the past few months I certainly can't remember where I left off in some threads.

When you finally implement a useful subscription function, how are you going to handle the gap created by the current, useless one? I can think of three ways, none of them ideal.

The worst would be to restart everyone from post #1 in each thread; I _really_ don't look forward to receiving an umpteen-megabyte email containing all of the thousands of posts in some of the threads to which I am subscribed.

Less bad would be to restart everyone from the next post in each thread made after the new subscription software is installed. For anyone who's actually been visiting the site when the current summary emails tell them there are new posts, this would be fine; for me it would mean either permanently ignoring several months worth of posts or putting a lot of time and effort into figuring out what post I last actually read in each thread.

Best (for me) would be to restart each thread from the first post made after the current software was installed. This would still result in some rather large first messages, but at least I'd see everything without spending a lot of effort figuring out where to start. Unfortunately, the current crappy implementation appears to have eliminated this option by incorrectly marking as read all of the posts it notified me about without actually showing their content to me.

It's been more than 7 months since that post. It's clear that this isn't a high priority for the forum software developers. In fact, if you look at Huddler's site here, it's obvious that it is their ongoing goal to force people to visit the site, to raise the visitor count.

I agree with the OP and many others -- subscription e-mails are worthless to me if they don't contain the full text of new posts (with links to jump to any of those posts). I'm on too many forums and don't have the time to visit this site every time I receive one of those e-mails. I've just changed all of my subscriptions here to "Site Only (no email)".

Maybe I'll return once in a blue moon when there's some issue I want to research. But I'm much more inclined to use Google, which will likely take me elsewhere for the answer.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Yeah that's the thing: by forcing people to come to the site, the opposite effect may happen, in that people just stop coming period. This is the only thread I even come to anymore (in hopes I will see that something has changed). For all other needs, I've just moved to a competing site that doesn't operate like this one. AVSForum isn't the be all end all. It's the freakin' internet, content and information is everywhere.

Of course I have no idea the statistics on if the opposite result is less visitors overall (my guess is their numbers aren't down) so really it's just us that actually care that get the shaft. Typical.

The proper answer is to add an option to include the full posts in the digest, but make the default subscription still be just a link to the unread posts (when it works anyway). The same people who visit the site now despite the inferior way it is being handled are the same people who won't bother to change from the default anyway.

Instead it just looks like AVS doesn't care about us, which probably, in fact, is true.

Let me add my voice as a disappointed long-time user. Digests keep users engaged, and will bring them back. Since digests disappeared, I've hardly used this site. I can't believe how badly this forum got screwed up. And I also can't believe they're proud of the mobile site.

Yeah, the mobile site gets use because it's on be default on those devices, and usage is being driven by device adoption -- not because the mobile UI is any good.

I really don't see a problem with the current subscription system. When I select Subscribe and Immediate the emails that are sent include the text response and a link to the thread or post. I like it

We are talking about daily digest not instant update. And the instant update only sends the email once, even if they are multiple replies. It will not email again until you visit the thread. At least, that is how it used to work. If it works differently now then I might have to switch to getting updates that way.

Yes, but would it be nice to list and edit subscriptions by last post date as before. I have a long list and I'm sure 3/4 of them have had zero activity for many, many months.

As for the general theme of this thread (people p.o.'d about having to actually visit the site to read posts rather than via e-mail updates)...no sympathy. Advertising drives the world, or at least everything that is free or inexpensive.

Click on the threads tab and that's how they're listed.

You can then simply click on any one of them and unsubscribe.