h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Add an option to the user preferences that allows the user to specify whether he/she wants all messages in the forum displayed at once or just twenty (or so) at a time.

Having all messages in a forum displayed at once is good for people with dial-up accounts who like to download a forum and read it offline (this is much more difficult when you have to grab twenty messages at a time).

If the latter option is chosen, then the first thing you see when you go to a forum are the twenty *newest* messages. The whole point of showing twenty posts at a time was to prevent people from having to download all of the messages in a forum just to see one new message. The problem isn't fixed if you still have to download all of the messages in the forum (twenty at a time).

Please consider this solution. Please, please, please.

We *used* to download the whole thread. We didn't stop doing that because we're capricious and want to make your lives more difficult, we did it because the processing required to deliver a long thread is *extremely* costly, and leads to a degradation of service to other users. It takes something like two or three minutes to download some of the really long forums. If everyone was doing this, there'd be no server bandwidth left to process other requests.

We will be continually improving the speed of our servers, and there will come a time when the time it takes to download a long forum will depend on your connection speed and not the power of the servers. We just aren't there yet.

"It takes something like two or three minutes to download some of the really long forums"
- that's when you're in the same building/country as the server Jim - on this side of the world it used to take 10-15 minutes or more on a good day.

;^)#

Fair enough. Could forums start at the last twenty (or so) messages instead of the first, then? Is this viable?

Yes definitely - in fact that's what we're putting in for the next release. We'll be as flexible as possible - giving you the choice (where possible) of seeing the earliest or the latest posts.

Woo hoo! Great, thanks!

With a 56k modem on a good day it only takes a 30 seconds or so for me to get the fourms. An Idea that I do have is the choice of first posting vs. last posting starting point. If you are following the fourm then you know what has comme before and chances are you are replying to the last few messages.

Just a thought

See above. And a choice is important. If we just changed it so that it always showed the last posts by default, that would be just as annoying to a different set of people.

Agreed. You guys rock.

I agree too, and there should be something in the querystring to choose which you want to, just like which skin you want.