There are a couple of mods I thoroughly enjoy that are only hosted on the LSPDFR site. Two for example, are Arrest Manager and Traffic Policer by @Albo1125. Albo updates these mods frequently. The problem is, there is no way to see when these files are updated on the LSPDFR site, besides visiting each file's page and checking the changelog. Whatever systems are in place for this to be possible simply don't work, and with the new website update, the "manage followed content" page (which previously listed all the files a user follows and shows when they were last updated, e.g. 'Yesterday at 3:36PM') is now also useless for seeing file updates.
 

There are two theoretical ways a user should be able to follow file updates:

Via the "Follow this" button.
This feature was around before the recent website update. This should either send a daily digest with any file updates that day or an immediate email whenever a file is updated. However it simply doesn't.
What it does do, is update users on every time another user comments on a file they follow. For anyone who has no interest in the comments on files, the 'Follow This' button is useless. In the notification settings, I have all notifications and emails turned off, except "A file I am following is updated with a new version" which has both the 'notification list' and 'email' turned on. Instead of getting exactly that, followed file updates, I only get a daily digest of the comments on the file.

If I wanted to have an email sent to me immediately when a file is updated, I would choose the 'Send me:  A notification when new content is posted' option. This option is unavailable (and greyed out) when a user's notification settings are set to ignore the 'Someone comments on something I follow' option.
 

With a custom Activity Stream
In the new site update, the 'activity stream' was introduced. I can see that, in theory, a user should be able to create a new activity stream that has the following filters in order to receive updates on files:

• Show Me: Content items only
  • As opposed to 'Content items, comments and reviews'. This filter should show only the files themselves, and none of the comments
• Content types: Files
• Follow status: Only content I follow

This should produce a list of files in order of their most recent update (with each files listed multiple times showing their previous updates in order), however, the list produced shows each file only once, and in the order they were first uploaded to the LSPDFR website.

 

Files and modifications to LSPDFR and GTA V are a huge part of this website and this community. It's unreasonable to expect users to have to jump through hoops however often just to see if their favourite mods have been updated, and this makes for an entirely negative experience every time I use the LSPDFR website. The only reason I use this site as opposed to a site like GTA5-Mods (which has perfect and extremely simple notification system, although they don't provide notifications via email) is because there are files hosted only on the LSPDFR site.

In my opinion this feature should be a core part of this website and if it works correctly I imagine it would be utilised by all users.

 

(If anyone could recommend a way to bring this post to the attention of any site admins in any way other than this forum category please reply and let me know)

You're barking up the wrong tree here. IPS are the developers of the forum software we use, it'd be great if they could add some of these really simple features. It's not the job of our site administrator to hack the forum software to suit our or our users needs. 

1 hour ago, Albo1125 said:

This is partly why I've built my own update checking system into my mods.  

For the record, I (like many others) use GTA V Mod Manager. A function of this manager is to firewall block GTA V for safety, which means the update checking that you (and any other devs) go to the effort of implementing (because of LSPDFR.com) doesn't work for me at all.

22 minutes ago, ineseri said:

You're barking up the wrong tree here. IPS are the developers of the forum software we use, it'd be great if they could add some of these really simple features. It's not the job of our site administrator to hack the forum software to suit our or our users needs. 

Oh, okay. I definitely didn't know that.

In that case though, hopefully the admins can lean on IPS to hopefully implement a better way to achieve this. Alternatively, if there's any way they could set up even a super basic and somewhat dodgy method of publicising file updates that'd work too.

I feel like it should be a fairly high priority to bring this kind of functionality to the site. Developers like Albo work day in day out (like he must be to be updating so often), only to upload these to a community that has no way of knowing they're doing this. Where's the incentive? I know with certainty that if I was a developer, I would chose other options to host my content, or at the very least use multiple sites. Simply put, that means less traffic to LSPDFR.com if developers choose other sites completely and decreased traffic to the website if the devs choose to use multiple sites. Less traffic to LSPDFR.com means less incentive to make LSPDFR the mod. 

Like I said in my original post, if I had literally any other option I would choose not to use LSPDFR over other sites that have this functionality.

One of the problems we face is that IPS is rather quite terrible at implementing fixes and enhancements.  We've submitted a lot of issue tickets to them, and to this day some of the issues haven't been resolved.  I absolutely agree that there needs to be a way to quickly and easily notify users about file updates, but unfortunately our options are rather limited.  We understand and acknowledge the frustration but we're lacking options.  We will absolutely try to find solutions, but it may take a little while.

Thank you for your feedback!

3 hours ago, ineseri said:

You're barking up the wrong tree here. IPS are the developers of the forum software we use, it'd be great if they could add some of these really simple features. It's not the job of our site administrator to hack the forum software to suit our or our users needs. 

To be fair, that's what I've been doing for the past 5 years. The entire downloads section (apart from the actual file page) has been entirely re-coded recently.
People seem to forget, however, that everyone who is management on this site has a job, and are doing things outside of LCPDFR.com.

@Moodym @Albo1125

I am working on a workaround for this since IPS clearly doesn't seem interested in implementing this feature.  It won't be perfect, but it will at least send notifications to all file followers when a file is updated.  No emails, just a normal notification.

Currently the feature is just in testing so it may or may not reach production, but signs are good.

I was assured this was fixed in 4.1. For files I follow, I do get a notification when a new version is uploaded.

Everyone, please see this: