Closed Number of posts per page?

Will look into it

 

I've researched the reasoning behind not providing a user-selectable number of posts per page and in short, I'm unlikely to implement something which allows this.

Basically, the problem (and I've experienced this on Somersoft numerous times) is that when people share links, they typically just copy and paste the URL from the address bar - and that information, including the page number of the post in the thread - is not going to be the same for all users if they have different numbers of posts per page.

For usability, performance and search-engine optimisation, it is far better to have a consistent definition of exactly what the URL is to any specific piece of content on the site (called the "canonical URL"). Allowing users to arbitrarily change the number of posts per page breaks canonicality.

On SS we just tended to put up with the occasional broken link (although given how often it happened to me when dealing with support issues - it is actually a major pain!).

Although I understand the argument for user-configurability of this - I'm unlikely to implement which allows this to be set on a per-user basis.

However, we can globally change the value for the number of posts per page site-wide, so if the majority of people think that 20 posts per page is too few, I would consider increasing it. Now is the time to make this change - while the site is still quite young and there aren't yet many inbound links that might break by changing this setting.

I'll start a poll.

This being said - I think there is the possibility of implementing a "print view" (aka all posts in the thread on one page) ... although there is the potential for that to cause problems with very very long threads. I might look into this, but it might have an upper limit to the number of posts it will display on a single page.