Anyone reading this who has tried to understand how subscriptions work exactly on this site is most likely confused. The current subscription options are just very complicated because there are some many types of subscriptions! For example, you can be subscribed to comments on single thread, edits on a single thread, edits on all threads, edits on all wikis, edits on a specific wiki, comments in a forum, comments in the entire forum, and on and on and on. I've tried to simplify this on the tool pages by making two big subscription buttons, one for subscribing to wiki updates for that Tool and one for subscribing to all new posts + all comments in the Tool's forum. Then there is also the issue of how often the user is emailed. Do they want a single email for every notification or do they want hourly/daily/weekly digests?
I think we might be able to come up with a specific set of "Subscription Plans" that simplifies things.
The weekend warrior
This plan will automatically sign users up for comments where they themselves comment and then send them a digest of those comments on a Friday night to be reviewed over the weekend.
The Intrepid Investigator
This plan would subscribe a user to all of the comments in the tool forum to be sent to their inbox in a daily digest.
The Watchful Moderator
This plan would receive all activity from the forums in a daily digest.
The Dedicated Hacker
This would send every forum update to the user's inbox, one at a time.
The Socialite
This would subscribe a user to the event forums in some way.
This list could go on! The added benefit to these plans is that we could display what subscription a user has on their avatar and it would give some context when talking with that person in the forum. For example, the Dedicated Hacker would know to wait until the weekend if they saw that they were having a conversation with a Weekend Warrior.