How do I get notifications ONLY when certain users post?

[Haikuo]

Dear fellow users and community Admins,

I have fiddled a little bit on my own settings, no avail. However, I believe it should be somewhere hidden, as I remember this is one of my favorite features before the major update of SAS forum. Also, I have just noticed that all of my bookmarks are gone after the upgrade, wondering if there is anyway to have it recovered.

Any ideas?

[PaigeMiller]

I don't know how to get updates when certain users post ... however I have complained in the past about the bookmarks being lost from before the upgrade, someone from SAS said it wasn't a popular feature so they didn't carry the bookmarks into the current forum, and I replied it was a popular feature for me.

The upgrade means that SAS has put effort into categorizing users as "Respected Advisor", "Trusted Advisor", "Galactic Overlord" and so forth, and apparently this is important to them for some reason, but really has no value to me; but they haven't done much to make the Communities usable to those of us who use it regularly. I have complained about this before. For completeness, here is my list of things that are missing from the previous SAS Community that would make this board much more usable:

• carrying over bookmarks from previous SAS community
• sorting of the threads by the date/time of the last activity (which every other forum software does by default); apparently this is not important enough for SAS to change, they appear to think it is just fine if the threads appear in random sequence, because you know us "Galactic Overlords" can just write SAS code in a minute or two and suck all the data in and sort it whatever way we want
• better blockquoting
• better threading so we can see which post is being replied to
• get updates when certain users post

I'm sure there are other things I should put on the list, but these are important. And I'm very very disappointed (as you can tell by my sarcasm above) that SAS doesn't make these improvements, sorting and blockquoting are not new or unknown technology.

[Haikuo]

Maybe we should get a ballot to reinstate these nice features?

[PaigeMiller]

I'm skeptical. I see no user interface changes that impact my work since Sept 2015 when the new forum software was put into place. I see no movement on the part of SAS to make even one of these changes that I have been asking for since that time.

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

Hi @Haikuo and @PaigeMiller - we appreciate the discussion.

First, your original question @Haikuo - you can subscribe to a user's activity, but only via RSS feed.  For example, here is the RSS feed for your most recent public messages:

https://communities.sas.com/kntur85557/rss/tracker?user.id=4877

To find this, visit the profile page for a user, scroll down below their most recent posts and select View All.  On the next page, drop down the Message Options menu and select Subscribe to RSS.

@PaigeMiller - We hear you and we are very interested in improving the experience for our community users.  Our communities platform does not support everything we want in the way we want it.  Some of this we can customize; some we have to work with our vendor to improve.  There are features we miss from our old platform, but on the whole we see a much more engaged community with our current offering.  And we are always striving to improve.

Let me drill into one specific feature: the sorting of recent threads.  I see the threads sorted by recency here:

All Recent Topics: https://communities.sas.com/t5/forums/recentpostspage/post-type/thread

All Activity: https://communities.sas.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/activity-hub (custom page we've shared before)

Board level listing: https://communities.sas.com/t5/Base-SAS-Programming/bd-p/programming

In spot checking, I see some other board-level lists where posts appear out of order.  That shouldn't happen.  I'm looking into it.

[Haikuo]

Took me some time to get rss into Gmail. Easy on mobile (feedly) and outlook (built in feature). Thanks a lot, Chris!