Number of Posts Displayed in Personal Preferences

[pablo escobar]

Google, and quite a few other places, have as one of their personal preferences in your user profile the number of items to display per page.

For a forum, this only makes sense. Some users will have a fast connection, okay the majority nowadays, and would prefere to set themselves the number of posts to display before a new page.

The admin control panel would be used to set the default posts per page. Then the user could change it to their preference.

In that way, if a forum has a user base of mostly high speed connections, the admin could set the default high, and then the user could choose to downgrade. For those admins where the userbase has slow connections, the admin could set it to a lower number.

 

[Mike]

Someone else posted this, but it severely hampers usability and SEO. There is no canonical position of a post within a thread (that is, you can't say it's on page X).

 

[Brandon_R]

To expand on Mike's post and show you the light think about it like this

Say you have your personal preference set to show 30 posts per page and you want to link to page 2. When you link to page 2 you expect the clicker of the link to view the 31st post but they would only see the 21st post because they are a guest and that's the default settings for the guest.

I hope you see the way it hinders SEO and linkage.

 

[pablo escobar]

No, but you can say it's post 34.....

As for the search engine issue, I'm not clear on how that hampers it. It doesn't look like you are using pagination as an html link, but I'm not sophisticated enough to know how spiders react to threaded forums and how they create links to specific posts/pages.

Edit to add: Never mind, yes you are using pagination.... My bad. You would have to eliminate pagination paradigm from your page creation. Maybe a creative solution exists that would only be thread and post specific.