Is there a Modification for SMF out there to display "subtopics"

[CyanGaming]

I'm looking for a modification that will display for example, the first 5 threads/topics of a board underneath the board when viewing the forums page.

[Arantor]

No, and such a thing would put a non trivial load on the server if you have more than a few boards.

[CyanGaming]

I have seen an SMF forum with this before.

[Arantor]

I understood you perfectly before. No such modification has been publicly released and if it were, it would likely overload your hosting if you have a lot of boards and cheap hosting.

Just because it has been done on an SMF forum does not mean it is available for everyone.

Additionally, copying what other forums have done is usually not great for competing forums.

[Kindred]

Yeah, as arantor says, that could kill your site/server...

[CyanGaming]

I have no idea what you guys mean.
I just wrote some javascript on my site and I got this working, it doesn't crash the site at all, it just takes a few seconds to load in.

I am using ajax to get the topics to display. Speeding it up would be possible using caches.

I know somebody could write a better version that uses caches.

[Arantor]

One AJAX call per board? Each of which calls maybe a dozen queries? Run that over ten boards and that's over a hundred queries, which soon racks up the load. Especially as Google habitually calls AJAX now. Let's just hope Baidu doesn't start doing that.

As for caching, caching is in fact really hard, because anyone writing s mod would have to deal with the fact that it is quite possible for people to not be able to see all topics in a board (e.g. post moderation)

I also guarantee anyone making the mod will have to deal with the number of people who want it to look very very slightly different, which makes it really annoying to look after.

(Oh, and I'm a former member of the dev team, I've written dozens of mods, I have the skills to do this but I assure you it is not as simple as you seem to think, especially if your site grows and gets busy.)