Should long posts be paginated? (again)

September 11, 2001 3:42 PM

As I keep refreshing a 350+ post thread, I got to thinking about what that does in terms of bandwidth. Would it make sense to break up posts that exceed 50+ posts into multiple sections or would that just discourage people from reading posts that happened earlier in the thread?
posted by willnot to Feature Requests at 3:42 PM (4 comments total)

Many traditional message boards do this, and I find it very useful when you're trying to get back into a thread after a few hours.

I don't know if it would stop people from posting... but I usually start at the beginning when it comes to a new thread. Can't speak for others.
posted by fujikosmurf at 6:30 PM on September 11, 2001

this very question was brought up back at the time of the kaycee threads, when they were generally broken up after 300 or 400. nothing was ever done about it, i suppose because of the rarity of such large threads (though i personally feel that there should be a paginating mechanism in place).
posted by moz at 7:33 PM on September 11, 2001

I think this would also help reduce the server load in times like -- well, like yesterday. I know I was reloading the original WTC thread several times yesterday to get updates on what was going on, and I felt horribly guilty each time .... If I could have managed to get a page that just had new comments, I would have been happy.
posted by webmutant at 12:30 AM on September 13, 2001

I've seen worse.
posted by norm at 6:55 PM on September 17, 2001