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Not sure how closely anyone is following along. I wrote some stuff about the discussion system here on my page recently. The gist of it is that threading (being able to reply to replies) is very costly in terms of storage. I'm commited to providing threading, and at this point the cost doesn't seem to be impacting performance (although in the future this might be a different story.) But I'd like to encourage a more linear comment style where this is possible.

Anyway, one idea I had was to put the posting box at the bottom of the comment page itself. This box would be equivalent to clicking 'add a comment' at the top of the comment page, or in other words, a post made from this box would add the comment to the bottom of the page, all the way on the left (or in still other words, it would add the comment to the bottom of the page as a top level comment.) You could still click [add a comment] on any particular comment to make a threaded comment that will go directly beneath the comment you are responding to (and be indented slightly.) But I think the convenience of having the posting box already visible on the page will make people more likely just to add a top level (non threaded) comment rather than clicking through to a seperate posting page.

Any thoughts? If not I'm going to try this out soon. We can always go back.

Also, I wonder if this would make unknown anonymous surfers more likely to comment? The box would be right there after all. Would that be good or bad?
- jim 11-20-2001 5:07 pm [link] [add a comment]

All searches (regular and advanced) will now return a maximum of 50 results. If there are more it displays the 50 and advises that there may be more and you should try to search for something more specific. This is to guard against people searching for nothing (or 'e') and taking too many system resources to return every post from a specific page (or the whole site!)

Is 50 a big enough number?

Also all searches were updated to not return 'preview' or 'pending' posts even if they are matches (already they were smart enough not to return matches from private pages - unless you are subscribed to a particular private page in question.)
- jim 11-19-2001 8:57 pm [link] [add a comment]