I really want as many people as possible to get behind this.
This woud be a great addition to all forums.
Thanks for the help!
Gary Michael Reed
P.S. I have asked Sony about this with no progress from Sony.

What do you mean by subscribe? Does that mean that they email you when someone has posted to a particular thread? I would rather come back and check the thread at a later time than deal with a cluttered inbox.
If it means anything else, I am at a loss.
I have found answers and useful threads simply by doing a search. Granted, it is not the greatest search, but it gets the job done. Really, I don't see a need for a subscribe feature if I understand what you are wanting.

j razz

I agree with Jeremy. The last thing I need is more junk clogging up my e-mail's inbox.

My opinion - having a subscribe feature is for forums that you don't monitor on a regular basis. I find that if I miss more than a couple of days around here, I've missed something of value.

Also, most on-topic threads have a lifespan of a few days. A question or topic is posed, discussed, solved, and we all move on.

Granted, I mostly only ever monitor the Vegas Video forum; if I were more interested in ACID, Forge, and hardcore audio topics maybe. But then, there is always the search feature. And I, like an earlier poster, will bookmark threads of interest so I can always come back to them.

I say keep it the way it is.

- David

it doesn't have to be email
other forums have a link or icon on the web page that alerts you to new replies to your posts, or new posts to you
that would be a very helpful feature

The only time we would get a box full of email notices is if we had subscribed to box full of threads. Notifications to a thread get sent to an address once, even if the thread as had mutiple replies since our last visit. In addition, if a forum subscriber does not want to use the subscription service, they just would not "tick" the "subscribe to" box and all would remain for them as it currently is. Those that want it can have it and those that don't, don't have to have it.
Gary Michael Reed

> I would rather come back and check the thread at a later time than deal with a cluttered inbox.

Actually, the emails have a consistent header so you can write a rule that places them in a special folder so they are never in your inbox. You view them at your leisure from that folder but you never miss anything. I do this with some mailing lists I’m on.

I would love to see this feature implemented. On every forum that I’m a member of that has this functionality it is an option that you set in your preferences. This way people who don’t want the email don’t get them.

~jr

I would agree that a subscribe feature would be very useful. I whole new forum software would be very useful. I read in a reply to my suggestion for the same thing that Sony doesn't want to lose the history of all past threads by migrating to a more modern forum with all the features most people come to expect in a forum. I say leave the old forum up as an archive if necessary and let people link to it from the new one if they want to refer back to an old topic.

Jim H has the right idea. Digifreq.com has initiated a new forum that also links to the old forum for performing seaches of past threads.
This is absolutely the best of both worlds.
Gary Michael Reed

In my opinion, one of the reasons this forum is so good is because people have to come in, look around, and keep up on things themselves without the aid of automation.

On the Adobe forums, they have the subscribe feature...and the forums are really, really dead. They have nowhere near the depth of information as can be found in this forum.

I'm sure I'm not the only who who thinks this way. I think we should leave things just the way they are.

If something's not broke - don't fix it. :)

i haven't read a good reason for time to be spent on this for this forum. If they replace it with phpbb then yeah, it's built in, but RSS feeds would be much more usefull then a subscribe feature, and I don't even really use those, I still prefer to go to the forum/website main page & read all the storys at once.

So what advantage does it have over bookmarking the thread? Why not RSS feeds instead? How would it help out the forums? I've used that "subscribe" feature on some other forums but ended up turning it off. Pretty pointless to say "there's a new reply!" when I can click on the bookmark & just read them. Nothing dark blue on the vegas forum I'm interested in? Click, bye!

And sig's? Why? So people can say "check out my production site!" on every post? If I'm interested in someone's site I'll click their profile.

this isn't a barbie forum or a game forum after all, if it doesn't have a usefull purpose it shouldn't be in the code.

I agree with kentwolf. Come in look around and keep up. In the 15 minutes I spend browsing this forum I pick up so many answers to questions I had at an earlier time. Also, I can see the I'm not the only one with specific problems for a project I spend time and money on to make a good side job. I''m not at the pojnt where I do this for a living but I'm hoping to hone my skills, and this forum take a lot of the guess work out. I work in the music field so this NLE field is slow in making an income. I don't have time to learn a whole lot of other applications, or new gadgets, or new terminology. But when I see that someone else has succeeded or failed with these things it take a lot of the learning curve out. Let not change what is not broke.

These two improvements (IMHO) would let us preserve what we have AND and improve usability:

1. Add a "My Threads" button at the top of the page so we could quickly filter the threads we have posted to. I find this useful for checking for replies to my posts.
2. Add a "Flat/Threaded" toggle button so you don't have to go all the way into Forum Settings and do the 3 or 4 clicks necessary to change views. I normally find flat view best for my needs but it is sometimes difficult to determine who is responding to what, hence the need to occasionally switch to threaded view.

Jerry

Ahhh, there's the first idea in this thread i do agree with ... a flat/threaded switch to flip between them with a single click. Along those lines, maybe the flat view could still be indented like the threaded view is, but show the whole post rather than just the title line. Another thing that could help that situation a lot would be to have the forum software automatically insert "In reply to _____" with the name and date/time in the header of each post.

Other than that, don't change a thing about this forum. I consider most of the other suggestions unecessary fluff that clutter up the forum and make it less useful. But hey, that's just my opinion. This is my favorite forum, partically because of the subject matter, signifcantly because of how the software works, but really mostly because of the other people in here.

Add a "My Threads" button at the top of the page so we could quickly filter the threads we have posted to. I find this useful for checking for replies to my posts.

Like this?

Rob

Add a "My Threads" button at the top of the page so we could quickly filter the threads we have posted to. I find this useful for checking for replies to my posts.

That might a compromise many could get along with.
Gary Michael Reed

One thing that would be nice, which I've seen on other forums, is a "Preview My Post" function that lets you see how your post or reply will look. Then you don't have to go back and edit your post as much for formatting and other stuff.

I'd like a subscribe feature in this forum too.

This is actually the only forum I visit that doesn't have advanced forum features.

And remember, subscription to a thread is always optional, if you don't like it, you don't have it use it, your inbox won't be cluttered.

bStro,

This is a limited workaround because you still have to navigate to one of your own messages to click on your name to see the profile. Or am I missing something obvious?

Jerry