[Trick] Endless topics

[emanuele]

Great!

Thanks for the beta testing!

[Chalky]

My pleasure

[Chalky]

Hey Emanuele    I have implemented this on my live forum now and it's working great.  Do you have any plans to make the page number indicator (page index, whatever its called) update as you scroll, so that it doesn't still show that you're on page 1 after you've scrolled through to the end of page 5?  That would make it perfect

[Biology Forums]

Are there any known crawling (search engines) issues?

[emanuele]

Hey Emanuele    I have implemented this on my live forum now and it's working great.  Do you have any plans to make the page number indicator (page index, whatever its called) update as you scroll, so that it doesn't still show that you're on page 1 after you've scrolled through to the end of page 5?  That would make it perfect

Honestly I still have to decide what to do with the page indexes...the one at the bottom is almost useless, so I was thinking to remove it completely. Also the one at the top is not particularly useful: if you have already expanded 4/6/8 pages you'd be so down in the page that you'd probably want to change topic instead...

Are there any known crawling (search engines) issues?

No idea, sorry.

[Chalky]

Great minds eh? After I posted last night I reached the same conclusion and removed my bottom page index 

[emanuele]

lol

Another thing I was considering is to add some kind of "navigation/moderation bar" (pages, previous/next, up/down, breadcrumbs, moderation buttons and other things) in a fixed div somewhere since most of those will not be reachable when the trick is active.

[Arantor]

Well, the search engines won't see any JavaScript so provided the regular pagination is working, they'll still crawl...

[wynnyelle]

This is a GREAT idea! I'd love to give it a try on my site. I imagine though that when someone makes a post to the topic, the page that they return to would be the end page of that topic, rather than the gigantic stream that they might have loaded beforehand? {This to prevent heavy use of resources.}

Also, let's say the topic has 200,000 replies. {Yes, I have one that does exceed this.} Would there be a way for it to avoid overload by eventually loading the next page by itself, say maybe every 500 replies or whatever was tolerable?

[emanuele]

This is a GREAT idea! I'd love to give it a try on my site. I imagine though that when someone makes a post to the topic, the page that they return to would be the end page of that topic, rather than the gigantic stream that they might have loaded beforehand? {This to prevent heavy use of resources.}

Yes, that's correct, but more than to avoid server load is because it would be rather complex to redirect to somthing that is generated "on-the-fly".

Also, let's say the topic has 200,000 replies. {Yes, I have one that does exceed this.} Would there be a way for it to avoid overload by eventually loading the next page by itself, say maybe every 500 replies or whatever was tolerable?

At the moment no, there isn't such a feature, but that wouldn't be too hard to implement.

* emanuele is just back from a marriage and he needs a bit of time to be able to code...

[Arantor]

In any case you really shouldn't have topics that long - it means pagination drops off in efficiency (and makes everything slower)

Ideally topics should be capped at about 25k posts.

[emanuele]

Just realised that such a topic contains more than three times the messages my entire board has... lol

If you want to consider limit the topics length, I wrote this mod a while ago (not tested so much tough as usual ).

[wynnyelle]

Arantor: how would post capping be made possible, as well as a smooth transition for members when the old thread gets locked and a new one begins? Would they be able to chain together?

Emanuele - I'm still unable to extract anything from that mod you gave me that I wanted to try a manual installtion on.

[emanuele]

Oh, forgot about it, sorry.

Two options:
1) I'll repack it (tomorrow)
2) download 7-zip and decompress any kind of zipped package.

[Arantor]

Groovystar: I have no ideas. I'm not a community person and as some people here will (enthusiastically) tell you, I'm not much of a people person either.

The method I'd use, personally, is to simply lock the topic and tell people where the new one is. But I'm a bit skeptical of any thread requiring a couple of hundred thousand replies, seems to me that it's likely better not being a real topic and being some kind of chat log instead?

[wynnyelle]

It's more like there are hundreds of thousands of threads on my board and keeping up with something like that manually is not possible for us.

[emanuele]

If you read my post back there there is a link to a mod I wrote exactly to automatically lock topics when they become longer than a certain amount of posts and start a new one with cross-linking (i.e. the old topic points to the new, the new points to the old) and numbering of the series.

[wynnyelle]

You're a genius!

[wynnyelle]

I discussed this with my staff and the issues that came up were these:

How would people's unread replies, subscriptions and bookmarks be able to be made fully compatible {seamless} with the "chaining" threads function?

In other words, would they be auto-subscribed to new ones? How would we avoid piling up on 20 or 100 chain-links of a very long-running topic?

What of all the manually created links to threads that use the "#new" function to bring the clicker to the first new post in that linked thread? Would it carry through on treating the newly created "chained" threads as part of this link, or would it die? This is a must for us because we have events that are linked to and that in their peak will generate over 6,000 posts in a day.

We have an upcoming groups feature being created that will place threads in groups too, and I am wondering if it'd be possible to auto-subscribe these chained threads.

Probably these are not concerns for smaller forums, but when you get to my size, suddenly a lot of things that were never issues before become issues, sometimes big issues. We have a lot of issues related to thread lengths and profiles with large numbers of posts on them, in general. It seems that when a forum reaches large size, you get a lot more members with huge numbers of posts and also threads with obscene numbers of posts, commonly you get threads and profiles with 5 and 6 figures.

[emanuele]

How would people's unread replies, subscriptions and bookmarks be able to be made fully compatible {seamless} with the "chaining" threads function?

Not sure what what you mean here, but I think I'll answer below.

In other words, would they be auto-subscribed to new ones? How would we avoid piling up on 20 or 100 chain-links of a very long-running topic?

What of all the manually created links to threads that use the "#new" function to bring the clicker to the first new post in that linked thread? Would it carry through on treating the newly created "chained" threads as part of this link, or would it die? This is a must for us because we have events that are linked to and that in their peak will generate over 6,000 posts in a day.

SMF's original behaviour is not changed.
You can surf pages like normal: you want to go to page 6 of a topic? You can, once you are *inside* the topic starting from that page, the trick will load the subsequent pages at the end of the current one.
Let's do an example: you have a 20 pages topic.
You go to page 1, scroll down, it will load page 2, scroll down, it will load page 3 and so one.
Same topic, you click a link that brings you to page 15 you are normally brought to page 15, scroll down, it will load page 16, scroll down it will load page 17 and so on.
Same topic you have read it all in the past, a new post comes up and you click on the "new" button, you will go to the first unread topic directly (like with a normal SMF installation), if this post in the last page than the trick will not load anything else, if the post is no more in the last page, the scrolling down it will load the last page.

We have an upcoming groups feature being created that will place threads in groups too, and I am wondering if it'd be possible to auto-subscribe these chained threads.

Not having any idea of how this works, I don't have any idea if the two will work properly together...

Probably these are not concerns for smaller forums, but when you get to my size, suddenly a lot of things that were never issues before become issues, sometimes big issues. We have a lot of issues related to thread lengths and profiles with large numbers of posts on them, in general. It seems that when a forum reaches large size, you get a lot more members with huge numbers of posts and also threads with obscene numbers of posts, commonly you get threads and profiles with 5 and 6 figures.

Of course I have no idea of how this is scalable in the real world, though it should not load the server more than the normal view of a topic from a user (since in fact it doesn't do anything else than load the "following" page by javascript and inject it in the current page. Of course if a user goes through a 2000 pages topic all by this means his browser will most likely crash due to memory usage I'd guess.

ETA: one possible annoyance could be that someone could start from the first page of a topic, push the "end" button on the keyboard and make all the topic load (almost) without interruption. That could increase the server load.

Note to self: add a minimum time before load the subsequent page.