WHY have you got rid of All On One Page?

[Pascha]

I HATE pages.

Please give them back!

MNHQ You've recently added the ability to embed photos in the body of a thread. Does this impact on the time and bandwidth needed to load a thread?

If a thread has lots of photos, would this result in a slower load time than a thread with a similar number of posts but no photos?

If so, why have you introduced one new feature (that no one really wanted) which slows down thread load time, and then introduced another feature (that everyone hates) to resolve the slow loading problem? Why not remove the photo feature, or make it optional so users can opt out of seeing photos if they have a slow internet connection.

If you must have a maximum number of posts per page limit, then make the same limit for maximum number of posts per thread.

Good point, Zachary. I'd forgotten they'd done that as I never post any photos.

Indeed, Zachary. Especially as the pics are the size of a postage stamp anyway.

Huitre

Well, you can click on them to make them bigger if you're on a PC, evilg.

But they are hard to see on a portable device.

True, Tee (you can do that on tablets too), but that basically just means they function as a link - like we've always been able to do. I don't see any advantage at all.

"I'll just look at that thread I was on last night"

So in Threads I'm On I click the latest post in it and then start scrolling back for the last one I read last night

"Hmm I don't recognize any of these"

"Oh wait. This is page 2. I guess we must have got to about 498 last night"

So I click to go to page 1 which takes me to the top of it and now all I need to do is scroll down to the bottom.

Then when I've read those posts I can click to get back to page 1.

I just used as much bandwidth as ever and it took me much longer and was more awkward.

And for what?

And now I can' skim or search up and down for what was said before either.

A 10kb photo for example uses roughly the same bandwidth as 10,000 letters in a post. For comparison my last post there was 661 letters.

No further comment from HQ, eh?

Put.It.Back.It's.A.Stupid.Idea.

A 10kb photo for example uses roughly the same bandwidth as 10,000 letters in a post.

And a 10kb photo would be seriously tiny. I'd guess nearly all photos even quite low res ones are significantly larger than that.

I've not uploaded one myself, but it looks like if you upload a 500k photo then they store that and display a small cut down version which could be 10k or less., So the 500k one then only uses bandwidth once for the upload and then once each time someone clicks to open it fully.

Still if you get dozens of photos in a thread it's going to be a bigger problem than having 1000 posts because it's still got to display the cut down version or each one every time.

Hi all. Just to clarify:

Pictures are served off a separate server so they don't affect the usage of the main servers at all.

Serving up 500 posts at a time instead of 1000 decreases the load on our servers and makes the whole site more responsive for everyone. We are in the process of adding new servers, but the flip side is that every day we add new bits of functionality to the site and everyday we have more and more users and traffic to the site so we have to account for all of that.

And to put it into perspective, only 0.5% of all threads on Talk contain more than 500 messages.

If only 0.5% of threads go over 500 posts why have you bothered to remove the all in one page facility? Surely it doesn't make a difference if it is so few?

So it won't make a difference to you if you put it back, will it?

But I expect this will be just like those awful roll-over drop down boxes with the embarrassingly crap pictures. You will just leave it and hope we all shut up.

Exactly Anne.

Whatever you're doing isn't working anyway since the site keeps hard crashing.

only 0.5% of all threads on Talk contain more than 500 messages

So that would that the marginal load increase (in excess of displaying 500), would be about.... 0.5% ?

And er...the users on those threads tend to be the more garrulous chatty and loyal to the site?

Just thinking of threads on things like the Apprentice, it often races through 800 posts for a one hour show. Splitting it into two threads will lose some of the flow. because he seems sadder than :(

If pics hadn't been introduced, could the extra servers they use have been deployed as standard servers ?

Come on, Tech, there are better ways to reduce server load than this, especially if it's only affecting such a small percentage of threads.

"only 0.5% of all threads on Talk contain more than 500 messages"

They're usually the good ones though. (The ones we're all reading). Where it can be good to glance back up to what was said earlier etc.
So while those threads are only .5 % of Talk, they are probably a much greater percentage of 'Threads I'm On/Watching' for many of us.

and, okay the longer threads might take a little longer to load - but once it's loaded you've got it all there.

I appreciate that as a tech person your agenda is to have the site run as close to perfect as is do-able. And it must be frustrating to have 0.5 % of the threads spoiling the efficiency you know you could achieve.
But we're the users and don't look at the site in the same way.

There must be another way.

When a thread becomes really popular and is shared a lot and brings in higher than normal traffic, serving up that one thread to thousands of visitors can use up a significant amount of resources on the server. Constantly having to deliver the 1000 message version of the thread makes the server very busy and slows down the site for everyone. Just reducing that to 500 messages cuts that load by half, even if it's just one thread.

And we are already working on other things to improve the load times - this is not the only change.

So cut the thread limit to 750 or 500 posts. Those of us who like it all on one page can keep that functionality, you don't have to serve giant threads. Everyone's a winner, surely?

But the option to view all on one page was only ever customisable wasn't it? So random punters coming off the net like for bloody penis beaker would have been viewing at 100/page.

So that doesn't make sense

Would it be possible say to serve AIBU, Chat, and "everything else" from 3 different servers ?

If I had an extra server I'd serve AIBU from it not images.