After many years of avoiding it I finally got around to becoming a member of AO4 a few months back.

During this time I've subscribed to 30 odd stories. The problem is that a few days ago it occurred to me I've never once received a subscription update email. I've had a few replies to reviews emails but not one single email telling me a story I'm subscribed to has updated.

The issue is further compounded by the terrible subscription page on the user dashboard. Unlike FF.net which has sortable columns for story title, author, fandom, date added and date updated, AO4 seems to only have the story name in alphabetical order so I can't just organise the list by date updated and find my most recent updates.

Is there some way to fix any of these problems? I cant find anything despite several days of looking through the options on and off. It could just be that I'm completely blind.

 

I've never had a problem, that I can recall, receiving email notifications for series/story updates. I do agree that the subscription list is pretty darn terrible.

 

I've not had any issues getting email alerts.

I know it sounds stupid, and I don't mean to be condescending, but:
1 - Check you've not changed your email. You have to put one in to get your account, but you can change it afterwards.
2 - Check you're actually subscribed to them. I tend to subscribe on the last update, if I've liked everything up to then. Using spacebar to pagedown counts as a click on the button if you haven't clicked elsewhere.
3 - Check the stories have actually updated. If you subscribe to Esama, they're putting out a chapter every few days currently.

I agree with the sorting though, it's painful. So is a lot of the searching the rest of the time.

But I really like being able to series link stories, and being able to view entire work.

 

You mean AO3?

from "Known Issues". Did you check your spam folder?
Gmail is supposedly problematic, but there is also a matter of your spam filter. Subscription notifications usually look like "[AO3] author posted chapter x of story". Maybe one of words used in email title is on your blacklist.