Always View Latest 15 Posts On Last Page Of A Thread

More than two years here (and mumblegrumble years on message boards in general) and I never noticed that. It even took me a few minutes just now to find them on the page. That does make things easier, thank you.



Unfortunately, the "last visit time" has not been completely reliable for me. At least one of my machines isn't being tracked properly -- the dropdown on "Active Topics" is sometimes noticeably further back than I know I've been here. I stopped using that selection and have been picking one of the fixed time frames instead. (It shouldn't be an ad-related extension that's causing this because I have disabled it on this site.)

Not sure if I feel or or here.

For what it is worth, Bobby is looking into my idea. Yes, it is a lot of work so just know that is the reason and not some other untoward financial motivation.

I feel a little like we are being accused of shenanigans here.

Oh, I ran an 8-bit BBS from the mid to late 1980's. I will take this site over what we had back then any day.

I am feeling a little underappreciated. I do not get how anyone thinks we make more money by not implementing this idea. It hurts that anyone thinks we do not give a crap about the users. Over the years we have done a lot to make the user experience better.

Perhaps CK's idea would help, but from what I have seen in the back-end it would be a coding nightmare. I still feel it will have unforeseen negative effects that will impact use experience.

Say you're gone for a week and you load up active.asp. There's 240 topics updated since your last visit.

The processing required to create a "Jump to first unread post" is immense. 240 times it has to find the first unread post for you in each topic. Then 240 times it has do do all the math processing to figure out what page it's on for each topic. Then 240 times it has to generate the link.

That's just one page load, for one visitor. There's well over 100K page loads on the forum a day.

Another thing that has to be considered is the advertisers, if I created this jump to link for every topic and it caught on, how many times would that completely bypass the ads at the top? A lot.

I'll look at maybe changing the "Jump to last post link" to a "jump to last page link" that shows the last 15 posts made tomorrow. Today is my baseball/family day.

It could absolutely be a coding nightmare. I know that well. However, that's never stopped anyone before IF it were a good enough idea. For many reasons, this may not be one of those said good enough ideas. And that's just life (and software development); I get it. I'll keep clicking back and forth as needed. No sweat lost by any means.

AND, I also didn't mean to come off as glib, snide, ungrateful or generally jerkish, nor did I have any intention of accusing this operation of being a money-grab, and I apologize if that's the way I presented myself. Like I said, I used to run a BBS (yes, WAY different but still similar) so I understand the work that goes into it and the financial considerations.



Most people would say I ran a two-bit BBS.

I agree, even with my pedestrian coding abilities, I feel (sorry jbuck) that "jump to first read" is much more intensive coding- and IOPS-wise than "show last 15", which doesn't really affect the overall experience and keeps the advertising about the same (I think?).

I truly love this site else I wouldn't been a regular for the past 7 years. I hope you understand that the suggestions I make are for what I feel is the good of this fantastic community. And clearly I feel more strongly about some of them than I do the others.



As it should be. Keep up the good work and thank you for a fantastic online experience.

A good reason why I do not like the last-15 idea is because of what happens when there are 16 or more new posts in the topic. You still have to go back a page. With the HFBCWG and Days of threads I am usually going back two pages or more after taking a weekend off.

Jumping to the last read post is the proper solution, but it would have to be calculated as needed (when the arrow is clicked) and not during the list generation. A javascript link would be necessary to have it determine the location when clicked.

Thanks bobby.