Site design, idea for super long topic pages

redlinederby Wednesday, 1/7/2015
Site manager

I've been working tweaking some things on the site to try and make things a little better (in addition to some new redesign stuff) and am trying to tackle the problem of super-long topics and how to display the replies more intelligently.

Some topics have upwards of 100+ posts and by around 20 things get a little hairy. I want to avoid classic pagination where you only get 10 posts per page until the end...having everything on one page is still best. I have the blue "jump" button but that was a band aid in the first place.

So my thought...

Is once a topic reaches X number of replies, the site starts to track/remember when you last visited the topic. Then the next time you go to the topic, it will show you the first post, followed by all the new posts since you last visited plus a few older to provide context. In between would be a button or something that would say "Show older comments" that you could click and it would show all comments.

I think this can work and would make it much nicer on topics where there is a lot of frequent chatter, usually tournament posts with many updates.

I don't have a picture/sketch right now, just thinking about this while at work. I'll try to add some sort of doodle later...but even without the visual aid, your thoughts, concerns, suggestions?


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