It's to stop people just reading the first page of a discussion and either a) not be bothered reading the rest and post something which has possibly already been said OR b) not realise there are a few more pages and post with the above consequences.
For b it's guaranteed to work, for a it just makes people put a little bit more effort in to jump the gun. I dont disagree with the theory (particularly when vanilla takes you to the last page if you've already read that far anyway).
What i am curious about is including it on every page but just hiding it unless it's called for in situations as above.
I was really appreciating Bergamot's idea to have everything on one page, I'd love to do this myself on our forum but unfortunately we've got too many discussions that have hundreds of comments so the amount of bandwidth and resources it'd use would get a little silly.
But still, would be ncie to have everything on one discussion page, and never again have the problem where your post gets nudged off the page with focus and no one reads it xD
In the Application Settings, increase the number of comments per page to something huge and absurd. That should do it. It uses a drop-down which only goes up to 100 though, if you wanted more than that you'd probably have to make an extension to add higher numbers to that select box.
You could just change the number saved to the conf/settings.php but that would be reset every time you saved some other application setting.
Ooh I see, many thanks. I might change it in settings.php for now just to see how it looks, then if it's okay I'll create an extension to allow me to keep it. Thanks again.
I like the idea of pushing the reader to read the whole discussion. It might save me from continually posting "read the whole thread, buddy" as in other forums.
The comment textbox appearing only for quotes on earlier pages sounds great. :)
Ahhh, I just tried single page discussions, saved one of the threads as a html page and it was over 500kb, I've got a feeling in the longrun it'd absolutely rape the bandwidth that we're already running quite low on (we actually used more than 99% of our allocation last month!) - I think I'll stick to multiple pages for now :-)
Yeah, I run a smallish site and don't pay the bandwidth bills (most access is on the local intranet anyway), so I consider the added overhead to be worth it.
YMMV of course, it depends on the size of your forum.
Back to the main topic of the thread, I'm working on a fix for the quoting-on-not-last-page issue that I think will be simple, transparent, and usable.
It'll be a few days before I have it working properly, though, since I'm still ironing out some bugs.
im gonna write a quick util too munge the phpbb quote style quote="name"] into the cite method you use. unless you got some kinda plans to support both, i had a quick look into how i could do that, but without some explanation of where to mess with im a bit lost. take it easy, i'll need this addon if im gonna move phpbb over, or else all the previous content is gonna look shit. damn quoters!
Comments
a) not be bothered reading the rest and post something which has possibly already been said OR
b) not realise there are a few more pages and post with the above consequences.
For b it's guaranteed to work, for a it just makes people put a little bit more effort in to jump the gun. I dont disagree with the theory (particularly when vanilla takes you to the last page if you've already read that far anyway).
What i am curious about is including it on every page but just hiding it unless it's called for in situations as above.
But still, would be ncie to have everything on one discussion page, and never again have the problem where your post gets nudged off the page with focus and no one reads it xD
It uses a drop-down which only goes up to 100 though, if you wanted more than that you'd probably have to make an extension to add higher numbers to that select box.
You could just change the number saved to the conf/settings.php but that would be reset every time you saved some other application setting.
YMMV of course, it depends on the size of your forum.
It'll be a few days before I have it working properly, though, since I'm still ironing out some bugs.
available at http://lighternetworks.com/~buf/quotefix.zip