I had worked on an idea today regarding forum "pages" and a different way to go through a thread's posts, but after reading what Mr. Arantor and Mr. Nao had alluded to in a PM, I need to ask a theoretical question now. If my idea doesn't work out and I just learn something, so much the better. I'd like to ask about where the limitations of how many posts per page comes from.
By process of elimination I found that the SMF "Number of posts per page in a topic page" would accept a number up to as high as 999. Entering 1000 made it revert to 15. Never even tried numbers that high before and never heard anyone talk about it much. On the surface it sounds like one of those "nice round numbers" somebody decided to use, but it may have come about by some sort of objective testing in the past.
I found the largest thread by replies on my forum that had 157 pages called "word association". My posts per page setting was 25, so that's about 3925 posts. Being brave, I set my active forum's posts per page to 999, and after a few seconds it came back with four pages, having re-sorted it all correctly. One hell of a scroll though (that in and of itself would not have impacted my idea though).
On another forum I can get into, I found the largest thread by replies was 67 pages @ 29 posts per page for a total of ~1943 posts, so the setting could have been set much higher there.
But on a much bigger forum redandwhitekop the largest topic by replies was 1569 pages. Don't know what sort on impact a high setting would have there.
Anyway, take the built-in limitation of 999 posts per page for SMF. That's a pretty high allowable limit as it is. What thinking lies behind that number? Is it a limitation for the server, or a limitation for the outside viewers or spiders?
Thank you.
By process of elimination I found that the SMF "Number of posts per page in a topic page" would accept a number up to as high as 999. Entering 1000 made it revert to 15. Never even tried numbers that high before and never heard anyone talk about it much. On the surface it sounds like one of those "nice round numbers" somebody decided to use, but it may have come about by some sort of objective testing in the past.
I found the largest thread by replies on my forum that had 157 pages called "word association". My posts per page setting was 25, so that's about 3925 posts. Being brave, I set my active forum's posts per page to 999, and after a few seconds it came back with four pages, having re-sorted it all correctly. One hell of a scroll though (that in and of itself would not have impacted my idea though).
On another forum I can get into, I found the largest thread by replies was 67 pages @ 29 posts per page for a total of ~1943 posts, so the setting could have been set much higher there.
But on a much bigger forum redandwhitekop the largest topic by replies was 1569 pages. Don't know what sort on impact a high setting would have there.
Anyway, take the built-in limitation of 999 posts per page for SMF. That's a pretty high allowable limit as it is. What thinking lies behind that number? Is it a limitation for the server, or a limitation for the outside viewers or spiders?
Thank you.