Is it really not possible to subscribe to venues?
I just belatedly discovered that someone merged two venues that I created (they’re two different rooms in the same building, hence the same address) : Edit #72387882 - MusicBrainz
If it’s not possible to subscribe to places, then all Places edits become ninja-edits. A seven-day waiting period for destructive edits means nothing if nobody notices the edit.
Really ?!?!
And really… anything I create (or, really, even just modify) in Musicbrainz, I should have the option of being notified if somebody monkies with it.
Is this actually a controversial thing, or is just a “we didn’t get around to it” thing? It seems like such a majorly fundamental part of a voting system to have a way for people to know when there’s something to be voted on.
(and yeah, because I know someone’s going to pipe in with it, I don’t think “just check out https://musicbrainz.org/foo/bar/important-edits every few days” is sufficient )
Created MBS-12090
also, Make it possible to subscribe to Events
…hmm… maybe I don’t create a separate ticket for every entity type, when what I really want is a “Make everything susbcribable” ticket.
I commented on the tickets, but: the reason why new entities weren’t made subscribable is that we’re expecting to eventually completely replace the standard subscription method with collections. For events, places, etc, you can already create one or more collections, add any entities you want to follow to them, and subscribe to that collection. That gives you more flexibility: for example, I have two different artist collections, one being higher priority than the other, so that if I have a lot of time one day I’ll check both, and if I have little time I’ll only check the priority one 
One thing that current subscriptions have that collections do not is automatic subscription though - I personally had to turn that off because it was overwhelming but then most people add less entities than I do I guess 
We could consider having a way to say “automatically add any places I add to this collection” or something from the collection page?
This sounds good. I did not even know that a collection can be used like this.
My main fear would be that this becomes less discoverable for users, especially new users. So it would be great if there is some kind of default and it is still easy to access this. E.g. currently I have the “Subscribe” link in the toolbar, that’s easily visible. But if there would be by default a “Subscribed Artists”, “Subscribed Labels” etc. collection per user, which the user gets notifications for, then there would be still a “Add to Subscribed Artists” / “Remove from Subscribed Artists” link. Just make it easy to access this by default, advanced users can then change, remove or add those collections as they wish.
What we would loose is accessing the list of subscribers to an entity. How useful is this?
Well, you can see what collections an entity is in (unless they’re set to private) so you could still see they’re in editor1’s “Subscribed Artists” collection, I guess?
Collection subscription is great!!!
I have been using them from the beginning.
It avoided me receiving tons of edits I don’t care about (only artist subscription was possible before).
Now I only receive edits related to the CD I own.
@bsammon so you should add your places to a place collection and subscribe to it. 
That’s why
you should be able to set your notifications to “destructive edits only”
Yeah, I don’t need an email every time someone adds some small detail to an entity I created(/edited/care about), but I would really like to know when someone has submitted an edit that will trash something I’ve entered.
And if it’s not clear-- I think this is a major problem. It’s all well and good for the MB nerds who don’t go a week without logging into MB, and read this forum on a regular basis; they (now) know that they can manually create collection subscriptions to keep an eye on their contributions.
But for newcomers, and occasional editors, who may spend an hour or more on some MB edits (not to mention the possible hours spent on research beforehand), having someone trash your work, and you get no notice because you didn’t know about some obscure feature of MB – that’s not a good way to encourage ongoing participation.
This is really an area where I’d say we should follow the example of Discogs – they’ve really got the right idea about notifications.
I think MB should ASAP (or at least as soon as we can get a destructive-edits-only flag into the notifications system) make automatic-subscription a default for all entity types.
While the edit that inspired this thread does not quite live up to the “trash your work” phrase I used, it was a destructive edit that did cause the loss of information (previous to the merge, there was a number of events that were attached to one or the other of the source Places – now we don’t know which of those two Venues/rooms those events happened in) And I didn’t find out about it until a year later (partly due to the nature of that year)
I’m also of the opinion that destructive edits of things that are linked to potentially thousands of objects shouldn’t be allowed to pass without at least one yes vote (e.g., merging labels - that can easily affect thousands of releases and relationships).