You're not alone Sharon and JamesW2.  I not only run my own books using QBO, but also have quite a few client QBO accounts.  All of my rules used to apply automatically as transactions came in and I didn't have to do anything.  Then sometime like 8 months to a year ago, something changed and now the rule still associates properly with each transaction, but does not auto-accept.  Like you I have to pick some random rule form the rules list, and click save, and then ALL of the rules and ALL of the transactions auto-accept at once.

Fortunately none of my clients accounts have developed this problem yet, and I set all of their rules up in much the same way I set my own up.  This is clearly a bug in QBO that only effects a small minority of users, many of whom probably just assume that's how it's suppose to work now... but it's not, and it doesn't fail this way for most peoples accounts.  Unfortunately because it only appears to effect a small minority of accounts, there is no telling when Intuit will be able to verify the problem, and acknowledge that it is a bug that needs to be addressed.

I would report it, but I have not been able to figure out why it happens on my account and not on other accounts I run yet, so without a way to help them reproduce it, they would just assume I'm smoking crack, or am ignorant of how it's suppose to work.