Notification subscriptions cannot be customised anymore.

[beedell-roke]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Issues

Body

This is a recurrence of what discussions/132506#discussioncomment-11294250 resolved:

To summarise, I am unable to utilise the "Custom" feature, which used to allow customising Issue and PR notification subscriptions, to subscribe solely to opening and closure (and merging, where applicable).

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

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[fregante]

This is intentional: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-08-10-custom-thread-subscriptions-are-being-deprecated/

Please GitHub don't break this feature. Very often I don't care about the discussion, but I want to be notified when an issue is fixed. Subscribing to "all or nothing" makes me not want to subscribe to any popular issue.

If you really want to simplify things, you can a "status change" subscription rather than individual events. This is what Refined GitHub used to provide:

[beedell-roke]

Darn. That also blocks discussions/61069, and significantly exacerbates actions/stale/issues/1190.

[glen-84]

This change simplifies your notifications experience by:

• Simplifying notification behavior.
• Reducing subscription complexity.

Do not speak for others. It might make things marginally easier for you as a developer at GitHub, but the resulting UX is far worse.

It also means that you have to send out many more subscription emails (potentially more complex in terms of infrastructure), to users who will just delete them without reading, since they are only interested in knowing if and when the issue has been closed or reopened. Senseless.

(@beedell-roke marking the above as the answer might make this discussion less likely to receive attention from staff?)

[beedell-roke]

marking the above as the answer might make this discussion less likely to receive attention from staff?

@glen-84, I've unmarked it. If not for the useless "Your Product Feedback Has Been Submitted" post above it, which obscures all useful discourse, I would not be as incentivised to.

I'd hoped that the discussion being unresolved would be sufficient, although discussions/202876#discussioncomment-17899035 being prematurely resolved — without any apparent desire to revert that — may, indeed, demonstrate otherwise.

[jarrodldavis]

@azenMatt @sunnyi101 @alondahari Why is this functionality being removed? The reasoning provided in the blog post makes no sense. There was no reason to remove it two years ago, and there's no need to remove it now, especially given all of the other frustrations many of us developers have with GitHub. I cannot believe that GitHub is taking the stance of removing useful features, especially those that help cut down on unnecessary notifications. This deprecation should be reversed, immediately.

[beedell-roke]

@azenMatt, sunnyi101, and @alondahari, I'm forced to unsubscribe from even this thread, due to my aforecited Discussions FR being blocked by this regression, too. I'll leave those unsatisfied by this change with a plea to upvote and support the undermentioned, in its stead:

• codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/7461

• gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/419013

I seriously doubt that GitHub shall revert this decision, although I do still implore anyone who has not yet demonstrated their support to do so. I'd like to be incorrect.

[nazar-pc]

I submitted an alternative as a feature request before this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/204555

The fact that it was suddenly removed without an opportunity to discuss is kind of a bug though. I expected it to be removed at some later point instead.

[Marcono1234]

The whole changelog post is also a bit weird:

• title says "are being deprecated"
  Normally I understand "deprecated" as still being available, but not being recommended anymore.
• The removal was immediate (changelog post was published today, with no information in advance)
  Yet the changelog post talks in future form, such as "will remove support"
• As mentioned in the other comment, the rationale given in the changelog post is a bit questionable: "Reducing subscription complexity."
  The customization was hidden behind a "Customize" button; the default behavior was no more complex than the now reduced functionality. (The only thing I can imagine is you clicking "Customize" but forgetting about it later; though I think the UI previously made this clear that you had customized it.)
• The solution in the changelog post is a bit questionable: "If this becomes too noisy, users can unsubscribe from any affected thread."
  That is exactly why users relied on being able to customize it, to avoid it becoming too noisy.

[moo1210]

Removing this feature with zero notice is ridiculous. I have subscribed to hundreds of threads since this feature released years ago. All of those subscriptions were to monitor a thread being closed, not to receive notification spam over discussion. My inbox will now be spammed, with the only recourse being completely unsubscribing from these threads.

I guess GitHub would rather me constantly poll the API for status changes, instead of removing a feature that worked perfectly fine.

[ArthurKun21]

I don't like this, the custom notification was a great way to actually know if the PR was merged/Issue was resolved without any other notification noise

[SunsetTechuila]

Users already told you that they don't want this change 2 years ago. Revert it