Unsubsribe from all discussions

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Hi, I noticed that I have been subsribed to over 2000 discussions, I would guess automatically during the site upgrade, as I don’t recall subsribing to such. Rather than unsubscribing one by one, is there a way to unsubsribe from all discussions (not forums, but individual discussions)?

Thanks.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Kalleheikki,

In the old COW, the “Notify me of replies” checkbox remembered your last setting, so if you ever clicked it once, EVERY subsequent thread would send you notifications, until you unchecked it again.

If you think about it, this is what most people want most of the time, right? Let me know when somebody interacts with a post of mine. Or, if you decide not to, it stays unselected.

But you’re right, having checked that “yes, notify me” box can indeed create conditions where thousands of threads could be triggering notifications. In practice, it doesn’t often happen that people get overwhelmed with replies. We have people with tens of thousands of subscribed threads, and it’s working fine for them.

But you asked about unsubscribing in bulk, which is also something that many people will want to do….especially now that they can actually SEE that they are subscribed! Our old forums did not do such a great job of exposing subscriptions.

The general answer is “Coming Soon!” We have our team working on it right now.

To be more precise, there is a known WordPress-level bug that makes global unsubscribe requests not work. This is insane! They have it as a medium-priority task, but we think it needs to happen NOW.

We don’t want to wait for WordPress to fix it for everyone whenever they get to it, so we’ve already funded the task for our own team to deal with this for our site, as quickly as possible. I don’t have a specific date to tell you, but no kidding, we are working on this right now.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Ron Lindeboom]

When Tim says, “Coming soon,” that means it is the very next thing on the development drawing board to be undertaken, Kalleheikki. This is a TOP priority and we hope to have it at your disposal shortly.

I cannot believe this function is not part of WordPress but it isn’t. Sigh. But we want you to know we are well aware of the issue and we can get it done, so it is the very next task we will be addressing.

Thank you for being a part of the COW.

Ron Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Hi Tim and Ron,

Thank you for your detailed responses.

Personally I would imagine people want to be subscribed to the threads where they have themselves asked a question, not to all threads they have participated in. But that’s just me.

Anyways, good to hear that the global unsubscribe is being actively worked on. Then I know that the alerts to my email are actually something I should read. I’m afraid I would end up not reading any after a while, if the ratio of subjects of current interest is, say, 1 in 50 emails. That’s my main concern. I DO want to be subscribed to questions that are relevant to my current tasks, or currently active open discussions where I’ve participated.

Thinking about it, you are probably right, most people likely have just a few questions they need answered, so they want to be subscribed to most threads they’ve posted something in.

Best regards, Kalle