A hard limit on the number of comments displayed per page
Title
A hard limit on the number of comments displayed per page
Short, concise description of the idea
In addition to the overall limit of 10,000 comments per entry, I would also like each page to have a limited number of comments, regardless of number of top-level threads.
Full description of the idea
It may not happen very often, but in communities or journals with high traffic, such as ic_anon_meme, single comment pages will exceed a thousand comments without even splitting into a second page (such as this entry, for example: http://ic-anon-meme.livejournal.com/5588.html). This happens because the number of top-level threads is fewer than 26 (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=62). However, in spite of what the FAQ says about 50 comments per page causing it to paginate (and this is an issue to be brought up in lj_userdoc), there are obviously at least twenty times more than 50 comments displaying on that one page. XD
The problem with this behavior is that it obviously causes a great deal of content to have to be loaded per page, even without scripting enabled. And with scripting enabled, depending on your computer's resources, the page may not load fully. Furthermore, this takes up a great deal of bandwidth and may bog down LJ's servers as well as the viewer's machine.
Thus, I would like there to be a way to limit the total number of comments displayed per page, even if it means breaking up threads. And because of this, however it's implemented should be OPTIONAL, as the effect may not be desirable for some folks whose machines can handle the load.
There may be several ways to go about this, and I'm not sure what would be best. The easiest way I can think of is to limit the full display of a thread (including its collapsed links) that has exceeded a certain number of comments (say 100, although I can certainly go for far fewer) and just display the top-level comment with a link to the page containing the full thread, stating how many total comments there are in the thread. The thread's page itself might be huge, but at least it's not contributing to the loading issues on the main comment page.
I'm really quite uncreative, so as I said, there may be better ways to do this (or there might not be). This is where you guys come in with implementation suggestions, if there are any feasible ones out there. XD
An ordered list of benefits
- Less bandwidth usage on exceedingly large main comment pages
- Less loading time and strain on the viewer's machine
- Possibly less server strain on LJ's end
- Possibly more convenience for users who don't want to scroll past hundreds of collapsed comments to find a thread they're looking for
- And possibly others I haven't thought of yet
- As always, the time and trouble to code and implement this
- Since this might otherwise inconvenience users who have no problem with the giant page loads, this would have to be a DISPLAY OPTION
- There may be no easy or feasible way to implement this
- As my one implementation idea stands, it might make it more difficult for folks to determine whether they're interested in a particularly large thread if all they can see is the top-level comment and the number of comments nested below it
- And others I hadn't thought of, I'm sure