The constant new pages destroy the flow of discussion and make posts that were just made 8 or 12 posts “up” seem like they’re weeks old.
This forum should default at 100 posts per page.
a hundred? what? maybe 40
100 as maximum with options for 50 and 25 then. Point is, there’s no way a thread with 88 measly posts in it should be a 5-page navigational nightmare. “Wait, what did that guy just say on page 2? Shit, not here, was it page three?” For fuck’s sake it was 27 posts up; I should just be able to scroll to it.
Are you serious?
Why do you need to turn the page so often? What benefit does it serve? No one is on dial-up anymore.
Also, posts should be numbered.
I never even noticed they weren’t numbered
Not a bad idea… especially the numbering, which would be great for referencing back, but for the posts I’d say 50 per page for manageability 
Posts are numbered, but the numbers are unweildy (7 digits, and they’re not numbered by topic). I haven’t seen any way to change this easily.
As for the posts per page, we could increase it. The cost of higher posts/page is not on most users (though there are some users and some threads that make a large posts/page count problematic). Rather, the cost is on the server. Most threads you read, you open to read a handful of new posts. Every post that loads is a database call that is wasted. Summed across every page load, that’s a lot of unnecessary processing. Too low a post count, of course, and the gains are lost to the cost of serving additional pages. To be honest, I don’t know much about striking that balance, but I would not want to go excessively high. I think 50 is a decent compromise, do you agree?
50 would be adequate
Going to the end of the page is a PITA on a tablet. Short pages are better.
Phyllo, why is that? Does your tablet load the regular page or the mobile page?
I second the request for more posts per page. I don’t have a number in mind, though.
Regular pages. There is no scroll box to grab. There is no button at the top of the page which sends you to the bottom although some forums have them. Have to finger flick to the end.
That has to be the laziest thing I’ve ever heard!
Well Mo, I didn’t complain about page length or having to use my finger. But when someone is proposing a page length of 50 or 100 posts … I respectfully disagree with that idea.
Me too, for the same reason. Maybe if there were a button at the top of the page to jump to the bottom of the page…
I think the number of posts are manageable the way it is. I, too, think it’s a pain in the ass to flick through too many posts on mobile.
If you have a decent discussion going on, each post can be several screens on a mobile - you don’t get a broad screen, so a short paragraph turns into 15 lines easily. It can get quite tedious flicking, and flicking, and flicking… and flicking.
Carleas, if you can set different parameters for mobile/tablet and desktop, I’d happily see 20 and 50, or some such.
And better yet, if you can make pictures manual-download for the mobile site… it would make moderating any thread Bill Wiltrack posts in a lot easier.
Daybreak has a point. I like where this is going.
Except if I’m on my phone. Then it’s going to be horrific, but we could likely change the default for mobile back to what it is now.
Carleas,
You should enable compression on the server…enable caching of old threads. 52/100? lol. Come on mang.
Currently, we have a glut of bandwidth and a dearth of RAM, so I’m not sure that compression would benefit us. But in any case, the files Google is recommending that we compress are inserted by the Amazon ad, and they don’t use ILP’s server or bandwidth. Also interesting is that the ad-free versions of the site actually score worse in the Google test, which is odd and I don’t know how to take it. It might be that the ad is including a lot of content and loading it quickly, so relative to the amount of content loaded, the ad-free version performs worse.
Tablet users: how many flicks does it take to get to the bottom of a 25-post page? Is it less of a pain than hitting the next-page link on a touchscreen? I always find that frustrating.