Subscription Misuse

[Jaskalas]

While there may be some grounds to consider this a technical forum issue, I very much blame myself and consider it a personal forum issue that I hope to make everyone aware of.

To begin, this is the problem: Subscriptions (41,999 Threads)

I don't use this Subscription feature, I had always assumed my UserCP was conveniently listing my recent posts for me. I enjoyed that part, happy to retrace my steps and find a topic I have an interest in that may have gone missing.

The problem is that I had no idea it was, apparently, permanently storing this data. It was not my choice to store it all, least of all permanently. I believe I had once chosen "no email" for the subscription option and then never looked back. I personally have no issue with this storage, but I figure Anandtech might.

I imagine it had to consume some amount of storage space and resources on your part. So let it be known to the Admins, other members may be unknowingly consuming this space by storing all this data. I have done my part and deleted mine, but I would very much like to see an option to automatically limit the maximum size, preferably by date.

Perhaps 42,000 subscriptions is your set limit, but I had no intention of using anywhere _near_ that much. I think you could make it much smaller. Something to consider.

PS, yes I've switched it to "no subscription".

[MeowKat]

Anytime I near 1,000 it starts to malfunction, so I have to clear all or delete several. I dont know how you reached 42k. The malfunction is a database error or I cant log in.

[oldsmoboat]

IIRC, it's disabled by default.
I like the feature but I prune it every week or so.

[destrekor]

Originally Posted by MeowKat

Anytime I near 1,000 it starts to malfunction, so I have to clear all or delete several. I dont know how you reached 42k. The malfunction is a database error or I cant log in.

I've got nearly 5000 without any signs of issues.

I don't really want to delete them, because I've had a few really old threads show up on page 1 of my CP, showing new posts, and I've definitely appreciated the notification and sometimes even what was newly posted.

It's typically a terrible necro, but sometimes it's useful, or a necro that re-raises an unanswered thread/point and it finally gets resolved, years later, when someone (perhaps myself) had forgotten about it.


Storage wise: if this takes up more than a few megabytes at most, then they have serious coding issues. It should be simple text in the database, like a CSV or something.
It should be under a megabyte, in the kilobytes range, in all honesty.
When we can get full novels in such a tiny data package, a simple thread subscription should be stupid simple.

Of course, I don't know the VB coding structure, so who knows.