How is this any different than a forum with old-school page size of 50? At some point you can’t load everything. The real solution is to address whatever issue it is you’re having with in-topic search, it sounds like you want the latest posts first? That’s a reasonable request…
50 is quite a big bigger than the current setting and in most forums you can set a user preference to increase that to 100 or 200. I also prefer a larger size because it makes skimming large threads faster and less stuttery. I sometimes find myself jamming on the page-keys to force a pre-load so I can quickly drag the regular scrollbar around to any point.
On the search specifically, if I hit the button while in a thread, I guess I would prefer ‘search this topic’ be checked and for the posts to be sorted newest first by default.
I’ve also wanted this for the same reasons.
I guess Discourse just can’t handle my skimmin’.
Just had a Chrome process that was using 1GB of memory and really bogging things down. Turns out it was the QT3 tab (as discovered when I closed it), so less memory usage would be my suggestion.
BUT WE GOTTA HAVE THE FUTUUUUUUUURE OF THE INTERNETS
Weird, was it open for days idling on a discussion page or something? What was the provenance of this browser instance? I have a several open right now in 64-bit Chrome and nothing close to that:
Nope, it’s on a work system that shuts down every night. 64 bit Chrome, Windows 7. It’s only crawled back up to ~300MB since I posted that so maybe some dumb interaction with our background scanning/security software caused weirdness. I’ll see what the numbers look like at home.
For what it’s worth, get the Great Suspender extension. Well worth it. You can flag certain sites or tabs to never suspend, but if you keep lots of tabs open for work, like most of us, it will help a lot.
OK, there is a shortcut for this now. The l (as in "l"atest) search shortcut is the same as order:latest and works on any search… including topic scoped searches now, as it always should have…
(sorry about the bolded L’s, I’ll see if @sam can turn that off.)
One potential neat feature could be random suggestions from a poster’s history.
Sometimes people resurrect old threads, and they are interesting to read. And sometimes, you’ll see a post from yourself 6 or 10 years ago, and you think “wow, I don’t remember writing that”. That’s kind of a cool feeling.
So if the forum had like a “pick a random post of mine” feature, that could some days pluck out something from long ago, some days something more recent, it could be kind of neat.
Oh interesting. Like one of those many nostalgia services that show you “on this day 3 years ago…”
Lots of people enjoy that. Good idea!
Make autodownsizing of photo uploads. Your default settings mean iPhones can’t upload pictures.
This seems like something the forum s/w could help with. Maybe store or fingerprint the link target when posted and provide some warnings before it glibly serves the same link after the domain has been pirated years later? Or use some sort of link blacklist and do some pre-fetching and safety checks? I’m probably not web/hosting literate enough to suggest a fix, but someone should have an idea how to prevent old link landmines like this which may be buried here.
Why? Bad content people may link to is not the purview of the forum software.
Google does block known bad links from their index (warns about them) and so does browser software. Those are much more logical places to do this.
I’d argue that it’s because the forum is a community, so you should do what you can to make it a safe place.
If I had realized the thread was many years old, I might have thought twice. As it was, it was a link in the sig file of someone I sorta kinda recognized as being legit. I don’t think you have to scan sites like Google, but maybe a warning based on the date the link had been added to the thread would have been helpful to me.
I mean, this is from forum software that gleefully chastises for people who engage in troubleshooting after the link has been clicked. If you can do that, you ought to be able to do this.
Help a brother out. Throw me a fricken bone, dude!
I can understand that view. But the people reading the forum do the initial screening of the link, so it’s unlikely a newly posted link would affect many people before someone reported it and I expect it would be deleted or disabled.
The useful purview the forum software could perform would be noticing and warning if an old link was hijacked or on a different site or host than initially. It’s not uncommon for small domains which expire to be snapped up by spammers or malware distributors. Could you fingerprint the site/host a few weeks after posted and put up a warning if it differs and has been a long time (~?) since posting?
I see it’s not likely it would hit a large number of people, but it hit a couple here and caused hours of pain.
How would this even work? Every link older than X years, we pop an annoying “hey this link is 3 years old be careful out there, poncho!”
And we would know that… how? What exact source tells us when URLs are “bad”? And it’s our job to check that on every single click of all links? Because who knows when a link to something bad might be posted!
At best this is plugin material.
Here’s your 🍖: run a modern OS and a recent browser, with up to date patches.
This is not the job of the forum software. This is the job of the browser.
It’s actually extremely common for bad actors to steal a user’s login to a highly-ranked/legitimate forum and edit posts several years old to point to their spam site, hijacking that forum’s pagerank. I think detecting and dealing with that would be a reasonable baseline feature.
Of course that’s not what happened here-- the posts weren’t changed, the owner of the URL changed. It would be pretty neat to get a plugin that changes all occurrances of URL http://X to http://Y. I’m certainly not going to do it by hand.
Not possible, since edits aren’t allowed to posts older than X days by default in Discourse. I believe the default is 180 days last time I checked.