Yikes. Did not know this. Thanks for sharing. 

Question: How do all of you keep up with threads in which customers are engaging if you are not getting subscription notifications?

2 suggestions for you on this, although I don’t use either of them (I don’t think I have the same use case as you)

1. Make sure this setting is on 

   

   That will give you things that look like this in your activity feeds, including “since your last visit” or “recently active” 
    

   

2. If you have a strategic post to monitor, add a moderator tag on the backend. Then you create a saved content moderation view in Control to check daily. 

Not sure either of those helps. 

Lastly, not to callout GS, but I’m dubious of their answer. 

I have a “Best Practices Bot” account that I never log into. It’s the account that posts some automated replies based on certain criteria in the post or replies. 

The email is tied to my email with a +bot modifier to make it a unique email address for that account. 

I regularly get new reply notification emails for this bot account, including subsequent replies from the bot (some of these are scheduled in 15 day intervals). 

I am not, and the bot is not, viewing those posts. Yet I believe I’m still getting the email notifications. 

Maybe there’s a time component they left out? I could see it making sense for a fast number of replies on a thread (like I’ve done here), so having the criteria not to send new ones until either you view the post OR a certain period of time passes? Just a hypothesis, based on getting emails about replies multiple days apart. 

I used multiple replies on this thread to see if you got one email about this or multiple… 

@DannyPancratz -- it seems the intended behavior is true. I got an email notification about your first reply, but not the others (and I deliberately did not view this thread even though I opened the email notification). So, test successful 

I, too, wonder about notifications in general; I have some other use cases like yours in which I think things are inconsistent, but I didn’t get into those in this thread so that this topic could be solely about one issue. 

And, thanks for the suggestions! They are indeed helpful.

Gainsight also provided a helpful video about a reporting workaround that might also work, so I do want to call out they have been very helpful in explaining that things are working as intended, and offering potential workarounds in the interim. And of course, they are escalating this feedback internally. 

On our previous platform, which was a very, very basic community platform, at a lower price point, we got notifications for everything, consistently. And, what I mentioned to Gainsight is that I feel the term “subscribe” has a universally understood meaning for people; if this feature is not a true subscription (which is generally either on or off -- no “did you view” variables), then I feel the “subscribe” terminology should be changed. 

I know that email sends can add up and be pricey for platform providers, but the feedback I provided this week is that a community engagement platform should not blunt engagement (in hope of saving potential dollars spent on sends). 

OK well this does seem like odd behavior. I now wonder about the occasional people who come to me asking why they haven’t gotten notified on subscribed content. I thought it was just going to their spam or something. I posted a notification about this in our community.

We've also noticed that, and I created an Idea to perhaps set a new notification if you haven't opened the topic in a set amout of time: 

We have wondered about this for a long time, too. We also had a lengthy ticket/discussion going with Gainsight support, and they insisted it had to do with people opening the notification email. If you get that answer from them, just know that is incorrect. It is view dependent. 

Thanks for this!

I knew how notification emails works and as @DannyPancratz suggested it is good option to keep on eye the "new” status next to the topic title. But this works only when you are logged in.

We used Khoros before. Khoros platform sends bunch of notification emails. Also it includes notication center. We didnt get negative feedback from the users, because user can opt in / opt out whatever they like.

Hopefully Gainsight improves in this area.