Hi,
I've been a software engineer for 25 years and I see a potential design flaw in the forum software.
The Song Swap thread I started cleared the 100 posts mark, and from my research, it looks like it's the first thread ever to do that, with the next highest being in the mid-90's. What happened is that the software only displays 100 posts and puts the most recent on the next page. At 100 posts, a thread gets pretty cumbersome, so I can see why it's split there. But, since no other thread has gone past that point, people are not yet used to looking for the true end of the thread - there's a "Most recent posts" button at the bottom, to go to the next page.
I think how it's confusing people is that when you go to the Forums main page, there's list of the 20 Most Recent Posts at the bottom left side. When you click on the link for the post, it takes you to the top of the thread. And that's where the confusion lies, especially when you're in Conversational view. If you scroll to the bottom, you think that's the last post, but it's not - it's simply the end of the first page in the case of Song Swap.
There a few ways one could fix this:
- Make the link go to the actual post listed in the 20 Most Recent Posts list, so we don't have to scroll or page to it.
- Make it more obvious that there's more posts beyond the end of the page, when in Conversational view.
- A temporary solution while a more permanent one would be to increase the number of posts displayed to 500 or so while a more permanent solution is found. (500 might get you a month of time considering how fast Song Swap is growing!)
Thanks!
Ann
A Smile Goes A Long Way