Watched threads updates
Many of you likely use the 'watch thread' feature, which will send you an alert when a selected thread receives a response. There are some options around this, but not many:
In practice this means that alerts aren't as useful as they could be. An update will improve the options available to users when watching a thread. You will be able to set alert settings per thread, allowing for alerts and/or email notifications based on all replies, posts by the thread creator, and threadmarks. Threadmarks are already a powerful tool for organisation and this update will improve their functionality, allowing users to get more targeted alerts about the threads they're interested in, which we believe will have positive effects for creators as well.
Additionally, this functionality will be valuable for threads with shared creative control or that receive user contributions like omakes. There's an additional level of control available to creators, and it will work in tandem with the thread collaboration feature or threadmark categories.
You will also see some changes to the formatting of the alert list. With the implementation of this update the alert list will be cleaner and more comprehensible. These changes will go a long way to improving the forum experience, especially in the creative forums.
Staff posts have been changed to no longer generate email notifications to reduce spam, and we're exploring further options around reducing the clutter staff posts can generate. Forum management is one of those things we have to do and having staff posts easily accessible to users is valuable, but it'd be good to be able to do that in a way that both doesn't compromise the thread experience and generate unnecessary alerts. More on this feature as it develops.
Subscription changes
Now for some news around SV's subscriptions. Several SV users generously support SV month to month through their subscriptions, and as mentioned earlier in the year, we are looking into updating our subscription offerings. That's work that is still ongoing, but in the interim some changes on the business side mean that we will have to close our existing payment processors, which are based in the Canada, in favour of payment processors that are based in Australia. That change will occur on 18 September.
If you have a recurring subscription this means that your automatic renewal will be switched off. Any existing subscription will complete normally, and no account upgrade will be cut short. The only difference is that if you wish to continue with your subscription after that you will need to visit the account upgrades page
This is a real hassle and we apologise for the inconvenience. We appreciate those that do subscribe or otherwise gift account upgrades to others, that money goes toward maintaining SV and in the long term plays an important part in the forum's growth. We hope to provide further updates in the coming months around how subscriptions and account upgrades will be improved, and we will be looking for feedback on our proposals around then. If you do have any suggestions for subscriptions features, please consider dropping them in our suggestion box.
