Stepping in here 🙂 vBulletin (the underlying software) has always had problems with subscribed threads. Not sure if there's much that can be done about it without some major work, which kind of wastes peoples time as the suppliers of the software keep saying they are going to fix it in future releases.
They said that for 2.2.6, 2.2.7, 2.2.9, 2.3.0 and guess what they are really going to fix it in version 3.0:rolleyes: