New change to forums, automatically subscribes you to a thread if you post

Another change I noticed, is that in the forum information box at the bottom of the page, the membership count has been reduced by a couple thousand recently. I don't know if it means anything, it just seemed odd.

@FlyingMonkeys, I don't recall making a recent change to that effect but I think it is a good idea. It makes sense if someone makes a post they should be notified by email if there are responses. Many people don't live in the forum daily like you do so as a convenience it is nice for the system to notify less active users there has been a reply. And, as you said, you can change that setting in your profile. 

@Chris, sharp eyes, I'm impressed! Yes, we have lost 2160 "members", to be precise. The short story is they were all inactive forum-only users who have not logged in for over 3 years and never posted in the forums. 

The longer story is I have been wanting to get rid of those old dead accounts for as long as I have been in this position (3 years). But I was afraid to delete anyone because of the experience everyone had some years ago when my predecessor deleted a bunch of old spammy accounts and wasn't selective enough and deleted a lot of active people who had many historical posts. Those posts, and people, are now and forever known as "deleted" or "anonymous" users. 

So I started down a rabbit hole with AI (ChatGPT specifically) to walk down a very careful path to identify old, dead, spammy accounts. I have spent a hour or two a day for the last week building a meticulous process, first on a staging site (mirror test site) to validate the results, and then on this production site. It was successful and no one who has ever posted was deleted. 

So thanks for noticing, Chris, I have achieved a goal of several years by using AI to safely clean up our site and make it a little faster and safer. 

@webmaster in the past, we only got notifications when someone tagged (@), replied (arrow) or quoted (").  It is odd that this began recently so I wonder if it's a Wordpress setting that updated but didn't announce itself.  I see on the Moderation screen that there was a Wordpress update flag but since that's not my role, I didn't say anything on the subject.

And just now, because I replied, I got subscribed to the thread.  I would prefer to NOT receive notifications unless specifically tagged, replied or quoted.  Receiving notifications for every reply to any thread I ever posted to isn't something I need.

For the purposes of research, I just unsubscribed and now am replying again to see what happens.

ETA: this reply DID NOT subscribe me to the thread.

(@webmaster) Thank you for explaining that. Nice work!

It was possibly a user convenience change from a recent update. As far as an update flag, yes, there were a few recent updates but I usually wait for a while before updating, and update the staging site first. The most recent update was to Wordpress version 7.1, which I just updated to.

As you may know, there is a saying in the software development world, "Never update to an even numbered release." What that means is, a major release is usually to a major ordinal number (version 2.0 or 7.0 or whatever). But since it is a major release there will usually be bugs or glitches or potential disasters, so we wait for everyone else to test the major release and we wait for the patch to come out to fix those - in release x.1 (2.1, 7.1, etc). 

Posted by: @webmaster

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@FlyingMonkeys, I don't recall making a recent change to that effect but I think it is a good idea. It makes sense if someone makes a post they should be notified by email if there are responses. Many people don't live in the forum daily like you do so as a convenience it is nice for the system to notify less active users there has been a reply. And, as you said, you can change that setting in your profile. 

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Jerry,  I am not subscribed to any threads. That is my choice. 

But this NEW change to the forum has only been occurring during the past week,  maybe 10 days.

Something has changed,  whether by accident or unintentionally. 

I do not make mistakes in my reporting issues of this nature, i.e., the continuous issue of the LIKE icon...after more than 2 years....many of us still have to click on the LIKE icon a total of 3 times to correctly record a LIKE to a post, without having removed someone else's record of them liking that post.

And by posting this....it SUBSCRIBED me to this thread....again. 

I have only been an active member here for about a month. It has been doing it since I first started posting...Its an ok feature that SOME forums have, but not all of them and I am on quite a few due to my many hobbies. However, I myself prefer to choose do I want to follow or not, not to have it automatically choose for me. But it is what it is.....if it all of a sudden started doing so all on its own....Maybe AI that is being used has become self aware, the terminator will soon follow.