(Thread closed to prevent thread crashing. Feel free to start another.)
When threads get too long, the chance that they do bad things to the boards software that handles the indexing of posts and threads increases dramatically.
But, take a look at the rec room posting games forum:
Rec Room Posting Games
Two threads have over 10 000 posts.
How long is too long?
Long time members remember all those indexing problems.
Not something any of us want to go through again.
Yes, thanks for pointing those out.
Long time members remember all those indexing problems.
Not something any of us want to go through again.
Pointing out may have been the result but not the idea.
I originally pointed it out in the controversial topic thread after the closing notification to justify the possibility that it was a 'controversial post' in line with the controversial thread. Then, when it closed, I thought maybe there was some other reason it got closed.
So, I started this thread.
It was just a cute little thread that grew to be a large thread. Note I did say it can be restarted, since there wasn't anyting really wrong with it. (Indeed you'll note even I posted in it. :D )
'Castle of Fun' was once a thread on the front page. It grew so large that it had to be restarted (after crashing), several times as I remember ;). Now, it's a sub-forum all it's own I believe.
Yep. The original Castle of Fun was a single thread - I believe the first thread on the old, old forums to hit 10 pages. At 50, it caused the forum to grind to a halt. So it was restarted. And again reached 50 and ground things to a halt.
The Castle of Fun is a forum now, over in the play-by-post area. There's a link in my user title. We still restart threads when they get large, though now the magic number is 1000 posts rather than a set number of pages, since different users can have different numbers of posts per page. Even though vB is significantly more stable than uBB (the old software that crashed), we kept the rule because we found it made the forum more friendly to new members.
We still restart threads when they get large, though now the magic number is 1000 posts rather than a set number of pages, since different users can have different numbers of posts per page.
Does that mean any thread should get restarted after it hits 1k posts?
The Castle of Fun is an open-ended roleplaying forum. Each thread is a "location" within the town/complex. For example, we have a coffee shop, a shopping bazaar, a bar & grille, a cathedral, and so on. Our experience (going all the way back to the older forums) has shown us that once a thread for one of these locations hits a certain point, very few new people would participate. Once the thread restarted -- remember, we had to restart on the old forums -- we'd see an increase in the activity of new posters.
When we converted from uBB to vB, the number of posts per page went from a static value of 25 to something a user could control within his/her user settings. So our old standard of restarting at 50 pages (I think that's what it was anyway) wouldn't work, because different people would reach 50 pages at different times. So we went with 1000 posts.
The number was completely arbitrary, and chosen because it's a nice round number. There's no magic to 1000 posts - a thread with 1001 posts won't crash the system, for example. There's a lot of really large threads out there, with well over 1000 replies. I personally don't recall there being any issue with really large threads on vB. However, Webster is more experienced in the behind-the-scenes matters of the forum, so it's possible he's right and I'm just forgetting about it. ;)
Now, that said... there are benefits to restarting. As I said, over on the Castle of Fun, we found that restarting threads made them more friendly to new posters who felt intimidated by the size of larger threads. In talking to some of them, they felt overwhelmed when the Coffee House was 900 posts long; but once it was only 10 posts long, because it had just been restarted, it made it much easier for them to jump in and figure things out.
So maybe there's some benefits to be derived from taking that sort of action with extremely popular threads elsewhere on the forums.