Hey all, I have a question for the community before I go ahead and do this.
Situation: The current setting for # comments per page is 150 comments.
Problem: The size of the page can be 1 megabyte (with large comments) pretty easily. This makes page load times longer especially for people on dialup lines.
Problem: The search engines might penalize large pages. A book I just read claims that Google puts pages >= 100kb into a secondary index rather than the primary index.
Originally the # of comments per page was set to 150 because of Drupal bugs in navigating to the correct page when the first new comment is past the first page. That is, if a page has enough comments that the page is split into multiple pages.. the "new" comment will be on the last page of the set .. and Drupal was unable to correctly create the URL for the right page.
That bug has been fixed.
This means the default # of comments per page could be set lower (say, 30 comments per page) .. it would reduce page size, meaning faster page load times and other benefits. Y'all would still be able to set your own preference simply by changing the controls at the bottom of a forum post.
Maybe y'all prefer all the comments on one page? Maybe you're okay with more shorter pages?
Ping... if I don't get any negative comments I'll go ahead and make this change.
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki
I wish you would make the change. There are several threads that lock up my browser because of the large first page. Even a 50 comment per page limit would work.
Dave ; Tennessee
XB-600.
Okey doke.. just set it to 30.
There's another reason for this which I didn't mention above. Every month the traffic on this site uses up the 50GB bandwidth allotment from the hosting provider. Obviously large pages would make bandwidth usage bigger.
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki