Wedge

No, once again you're not reading what I'm writing.

I do not have time to waste explaining this over and over. I will give it one more shot.No. I even gave you a screenshot for this. It is website.com/boardname/topicnumber/topic-title where the boardname can have multiple / in it (e.g. /pub/feats like this board does) and can include something for the category if so desired. /pub/ is one board, /pub/feats/ is another board. As it happens it is a child board of /pub/ but it doesn't actually have to be.Yes, it does. It's also not relevant that it does. You're missing the entire point of the difference between forums and blogs.

Blogs = few authors creating topics. Each topic is more important in itself and needs more things like meta data.

Forums = everyone's an author. Each topic is no more important in itself than any other, and as such meta data is not going to be entered by most users.I didn't talk about bookmarks. I'm talking about people sharing content via social media etc.

What you're arguing for isn't how people use sites and sharing information.

The only thing I have to thank you for is wasting my time arguing about something you clearly don't understand. (It is crap like this that makes me look forward to TWO MONTHS not touching Wedge at all. I can't wait, because dealing with people who think they know what they're talking about, when they don't, is very frustrating.)

Well done for inverting the meaning of two well defined terms.Why? Because you say it should? The admin configures what it has, as I showed you. The admin can set it either way to their preference. In any case, this is not and has NEVER been an SEO feature. It is for making links nicer.

I really wish you'd read what I'm saying and not projecting your own meaning on it.That's the marginal benefit I mentioned: the link can include keywords in auto linked text. Long topic links may or may not hurt SEO. But I'd rather make something for USERS not search engines.

Yeah, it's bugged me for a while - r2162 fixes that (and replicates the function to scheduled tasks)

Computing the percentage is relatively easy when you get down to it. You know the number of posts in the thread, you can figure out where the user is readily enough, so you know where you are in terms of the whole. Where you are divided by the total multiplied by the size of the bar = how much of the bar is filled in. Doing it dynamically isn't really much of a challenge in practical terms.Oh, I wasn't trying to reverse the claim. But I will undermine it somewhat.

So, let's take the comparison fairly: one chapter of a book is one topic.[1] You're using symbols to indicate where you are for your own reference. It doesn't matter what that symbol is as long as you can recognise it. Some people use bookmarks, some turn the corner or some other physical marker. Whatever, you have a marker for your use to indicate where you are.

And if that was all it was - a reference point for you and you alone, the argument would stand quite happily. But a forum is implicitly not a private resource. The markers are not entirely for you. You will still have your own markers, of course, but a forum is a shared resource. Other people will want their markers too.

Since we're already doing markers, let's be really daring and set out markers that everyone can use. And just for shits 'n' giggles, let's use those funny Arabic squiggles... Oh wait... now I have page numbers.

Putting aside the whole 'everyone can set their own page numbers'[2] if you have a common reference, you have a common way to gauge the length of a topic in terms of relevance (a 10 page topic is more likely to be heated and/or drifty than a 2 page topic), that everyone can agree on and see the same thing.

It then means you can say 'jeebus, that went on for 3 damn pages' and everyone knows what you mean.

Then you have the argument of bookmarking - but sharing that bookmark. Say you find a particularly thrilling paragraph, you can't just say 'about 1/2 way down and if you get to <that bit> you've missed it'. But if you have a common frame of reference, you can direct people to it. Sure, we have post links and permalinks and whatnot but it sort of misses some context to be able to point to the page as a whole. And that goes for sharing.

Then there's the psychological aspect. Humans don't do well with vast amounts of stuff. We're born to filter out and prioritise[3] and that means we do a process frequently referred to as chunking. We take a given process or data set and process it into a more manageable form so we don't have to do it again. Giving a standardised chunk of content, we'll do that. We'll mentally scan and summarise - and store the summary thereof. Having pages is a convenient enabler for that process. Especially in a discussion with multiple parties and whatnot. And of course if the thread is very long, you might just read the first post and skip to second-to-last page.

The long story short... yes, you would likely read a book without page numbers. But it's not a book that everyone else can read and write the next chapter to at the same time. A forum on the other hand... :lol:

1.	I have successfully co-authored a novel using the forum as a medium for doing so.
2.	Which most people never do, and most forum systems don't have the option anyway. I should really remove it in Wedge, it serves little real benefit.
3.	cf. all the studies about looking at pictures of planes and crowds and not noticing that an engine has disappeared, or the gorilla walking through the crowd or whatever.

999 is mostly a safety barrier.

On all levels, it's a balance between performance and usability. Too many on one page is a performance killer, because it takes longer to process, plus eats more bandwidth - but it would use less bandwidth than each page being requested separately, of course.

As Ben (RAWK's owner) found, there is actually a much finer balance under the hood - more pages = fewer posts per page = more queries to be issued = harder hit in the long run. Plus there are all sorts of implied limitations in terms of using more resources and limiting others.

The 999 then is more a theoretical rather than practical limit, and 20-40 per page is really a more practical limit, ideally 15-20 for smaller forums and 20-25 for larger forums as that's what's shown to work best in terms of balancing requests (and all the queries with that) with the load of processing each request.

There is also the implication attached to infinite scrolling and all the same issues apply there too (just you don't explicitly click on the next page button)... plus all the attendant issues with too much content on mobile and of course search engines - they don't do infinite scrolling, and too much content in a page is bad for SEO too.

In other news, the person who told me about the back-handed comments also found it highly amusing that the RSS feed imports are re-re-reimporting old content. Like blog posts from 2012. Repeatedly. A person who describes themselves as knowing they are a good forum admin and 'that's all that matters' would probably have kept on top of this. I should add, I've noticed even some of the other AAF contributors actually calling it a joke on some other admin forums.

I'm sure Shawn has seen this, since he logged in yesterday and changed his username. The fact he didn't argue his case... either he knows he's wrong and doesn't want to face the consequences (as much of an arse as I am, I do react relatively well to people owning their own mistakes) or he's convinced he's right and that I and Wedge suck. Either way, no great loss to this community.

Only if you use the code bbc itself... it won't if you don't use square brackets.