I’ve been babbling in a few (probably too many) threads, and I’ve subscribed to a number of them that I haven’t posted to, but still want to keep track of.
Is there an upper limit to the number of threads you can subscribe to? I’m at 36 or so now; when will the SDMB tell me, “ENOUGH!! NO! You can’t have any more!”?
Thanks!
Cheers,
bcg
Nope, don’t think so.
I have 194 (so far).
You have little or nothing to worry about.
At any rate, I have quite a way to go before I have to worry.
Thanks!
Cheers,
bcg
I’m subscribed to 1508 (and with this post 1509) threads right now. I’ve never emptied them because every once in a while I like to go back and re-read some of the older stuff. You’re good.
2843 here and going strong.
I have mine broken up into subfolders, but I bet the total number is nearing 10,000.
I’m beginning to wonder if, instead of asking the question I asked, I should have asked, “who is subscribed to the most threads?” (though I’m suspecting that if closing on 10,000 isn’t the winner, I really don’t want to know ).
Thanks to everyone who answered; the bottom line is that I don’t have to prune my “subscribed” list anytime soon, if ever. I can sleep content. 
Cheers,
bcg
I went and checked - I have over 3000, nowhere near 10,000. But I bet some of the prolific posters do.
I had to go and check how many I had - and it’s 6,289. This thread will make it 6,290.
I’m no expert on vBulletin so please forgive me if this a dumb thought, but I would think having these astronomical numbers of subscribed threads per user has a direct impact on the overall performance of the board in various ways. I count something like 25,000 subscribed threads just among the few responders to this thread. Consider the extra work the board does each time a search is performed. If you’re subscribed to 10,000 threads, each time you try to search, the list of results has to be compared against a list of 10,000 threads just so it knows if it should display the little ‘subscribed’ icon or not on the found set of results. Depending how the feature was implemented it might not work that way, but judging from the various shortcomings in vBulletin search it would not surprise me if every single search you perform cross-checks your entire subscription list for each result returned.
I would be surprised if it was implemented in this extremely inefficient way, vBulletin or no.
But to the best of my knowledge, it’s not ‘searching’ for these threads. Look at it this way. If you wanted all of your red socks, you could open the giant sock drawer and look through all your socks. Since you’re sock drawer is soooooo big, it might take a while to get all the red socks. But if you ‘subscribed’ to them (so to speak), all you’d have to do is open the ‘red sock drawer’ and there they are.
Really, I think it takes a load off the server since people don’t have to search for their user name to see what they had posted to.
Of course I could be entirely wrong about the whole thing,
No, I think you’re correct, Joey: It makes sense to me that the smaller the search field the less resource intensive the search. You’re applying filters to a large group to winnow out a much smaller subset. It’s easier to manage the subset than the whole field.
I say this without having engineer-level understanding of vB so I could be totally wrong here, but isn’t this how it works?
This is true in the sense of using the subscription manager, or whatever it is called, to take a look at all your subscribed threads instead of searching for them but that isn’t what I meant. That probably does reduce server overhead compared to performing a search for your threads, in fact it certainly must. But what I was referring to is that after performing any search in general, as the list of found results is returned, each one that you are subscribed to is denoted by a special icon. If your search finds 20 different threads, and among those, you happen to be subscribed to 5, then 5 of the found results show a little orange “I am subscribed to this” icon. The software has to have some mechanism for determining that and it must use some amount of resources to do so however the comparison is done. Anyway as I said I’m definitely not an expert on vBulletin but I did find this from their manual:
“Check Thread Subscription
If enabled, this option will notify the user that they are subscribed to a thread by displaying a small icon when viewing forumdisplay and search results. It will also change the “Subscribe to this thread” text on showthread to “Unsubscribe from this thread”. This can have an effect on performance.”
I don’t want to cross the line into Junior IT’ing here I’m sure the thought, if it is valid, has already crossed the minds of the board staff. I just saw the huge number of threads people are subscribing to and it dawned on me I’ve also been seeing a lot of messages about poor search performance and there might be some connection there.