View all comments/posts by this user

June 15, 2005 4:30 PM

View all comments/posts by this user. Some time in the past six months (possibly very recently), the "View all comments/posts" interface has changed. Instead of being an enormous page, referencing every post made (sometimes into the thousands), the big list is now split up into batches of 50. [This is good] - it's a no-brainer way of reducing server load. That said, could there be a way of viewing every post on one page?
posted by Marquis to Feature Requests at 4:30 PM (16 comments total)

I'm trying to find a post I made several years ago. The MeFi Search isn't helping, as the keywords are pretty generic and I can't even pare it down by putting my user-name in the search field.

It would be dead simple for me to find the post if I could just see a page with every thread I've posted in (as it used to be) - I'd hit Apple-F and jump to it in two secs. But right now I'd need to scroll through many pages of results - and for some users, it's gotta be much worse.

By no means do I think the "View All" option should be the default, or even prominently displayed, but I do think it is useful enough that it ought to remain available.
posted by Marquis at 4:33 PM on June 15, 2005

Try using Yahoo and limiting your search to metafilter (append "site:metafilter.com"). Yahoo indexes MeFi a hell of a lot better (and more often) than Google.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:13 PM on June 15, 2005

But it still would be useful to have the "View All" option available. Second the motion.
posted by languagehat at 5:33 PM on June 15, 2005

Third. And for the same reason.
posted by ColdChef at 6:39 PM on June 15, 2005

I like the old (one page) system, too. The option would be nice (though hella-taxing on the server).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:52 PM on June 15, 2005

What if the everything pages were only generated once a week during the wee hours of the morning. Serving a big static page shouldn't be too taxing and the generation could be throttled and ran during slow periods. Cut the load even more by first selecting for only the users who posted in the last week.
posted by Mitheral at 9:06 PM on June 15, 2005

Considering that MeFi ran with the one page model for years and years, I don't think having the occasional user electing to use the one-page option is going to break the system. If it's easy, I vote for it too--as an option, not a default.
posted by squirrel at 2:16 AM on June 16, 2005

Mitheral: That would still probably be a lot more taxing, considering you have to generate at least 200 very large pages. Given that MeFi doesn't have times that it's really zippy, I think the better solution would be to generate on demand, cache, and only regenerate if the cached version is more than one week old.

This sounds like a perfect candidate for MeFi Pro…
posted by fvw at 3:17 AM on June 16, 2005

Considering that MeFi ran with the one page model for years and years

However, it also had less users.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:17 AM on June 16, 2005

And the users had less posts.
posted by raedyn at 11:29 AM on June 16, 2005

And the posts had less...
posted by Necker at 1:51 PM on June 16, 2005

Also, less.
posted by squirrel at 8:04 PM on June 16, 2005

Bah. I don't recall hearing mathowie ever complaining about it, or even mentioning it. I think he made the change at the request of users life myself, who didn't want to load a thousand comments on one page. There didn't seem to be a huge relief in server load directly after, so I don't reckon that post history requests are as popular as we here seem to think they are.

One man can tell us for sure.
posted by squirrel at 8:09 PM on June 16, 2005

Fewer.

See, you can remember the difference like this: "less" is the answer to "how much?", while "fewer" is the answer to "how many?": "less ice, fewer ice cubes"
posted by gleuschk at 5:37 AM on June 17, 2005

Fewer. That's a funny word. If you repeat it over and over again it starts to sound German...
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:08 PM on June 17, 2005

/godwin
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:09 PM on June 17, 2005