I think I can now explain the apparent erratic behaviour of ebots from the forums, after observation of various threads that I've participated in - or to be precise, attempted to participate in. I tried to run an experiment in this thread : no ebots but everybody was being terribly polite and the scientific method goes to pot if you're not allowed to tell people what results you expect. :)

Ok, so this is what happens. I post in an existing thread, or start a new one, and I check the 'notify me' box. At the top of the thread I now see a red button:  This tells me that I'm subscribed to the thread and should expect notifications from it.

If somebody replies to the thread, I get an e-mail to tell me about it ('ebot'). All well and good so far.

If I reply, the cycle continues and everything is fine.

If I don't post a reply, but just visit the thread, I won't get any more ebots. Not ever. The Unsubscribe button remains red, but I am now already effectively unsubscribed unless I post something. The same problem applies if I subscribe to an interesting thread because I want to see what the experts have to say without contributing anything myself. Unless I post something, I will never get any ebots from that thread.

This is what should happen: if a member visits a thread to which they are subscribed, it should be treated as if they had posted whether they did or not, so that they will get an ebot from the first subsequent reply. This is how the forum used to work until it was broken.

Please pass this information on to the techies and ask them to fix it as soon as possible, because it's destroying the sense of community in the forum. Several times recently I've stumbled across a thread that I'd assumed had gone dormant, only to find that I've missed all the interesting and/or entertaining stuff, and that for all I know the other members in that thread think I'm a grouch because I haven't answered their questions or laughed at their jokes. :)

Note that the above only applies to forum threads. I don't have any insights to offer on gallery notifications. I expect the mechanism is different there - or is it? ;)

I'll pass this along. :)

We're getting there. I now get one ebot when someone replies to a subscribed thread - but I still get nothing further if I just read and don't reply.