Number Of Posts Per Page Shrunk?

That was me. I was wondering if any one would notice. OK, explanation...

I did some pretty extensive research and noticed that topics that go to page 2 on forum.asp have essentially met the kiss of death. 99.9% of the time they are never revisited. As we get busier, we have quite a few really good topics die this way and it kills me.

I think members tend to think (probably subconsciously) that if it's on page 2 it must be "old", a year and a half ago, they would be right. But no more, we're busy now! Take a look at the main coin forum right now, with the old settings, the oldest topic on page 1 would have been yesterday!

So, I set the items per page to 30, this is a global setting that includes topics per page (forum.asp and posts per page (topic.asp . Topics last a whole lot longer and most run their course the way they should. But then, we have 30 replies per page. A lot more scrolling. A lot heavier pages. A lot more bandwidth, especially since we have a ton of pictures (think of our dial up users waiting for 30 posts of pics to load ).

Sooo... I tweaked the code to split the settings for "items per page", I can now do topics and posts independently. What you didn't notice (or at least mention) is that there are now 40 topics per page. Topics don't die a premature death now. I can see the effects already, there are more posts with less bandwidth, since most users just click on the last page of an updated topic that they're following. If you just click on the last page, it doesn't really matter if it's page 2 or 4.

I can see an overall improvement in the "flow".

Full marks for observation Sap.
"Active Topics" is the way I browse too.
regards,