10,000 post limit too low

[ossia (Quincy Larson)]

We have a thread that has reached 10,000 posts and became locked. How do we unlock this or raise the limit?

[DeanMarkTaylor (Dean Taylor)]

This feature is there for a reason, refer to this topic where the feature was introduced:

Using private / personal messages as long term chat

One thing we’ve noticed come up on a few sites is a pattern of behavior where users make almost no public posts, but spend most of their time in very, very long PM topics that can be tens of thousands of replies long There are a few problems with this: We currently have a massive perf problem with longer topics as we send down a list of all IDs of all replies in the topic, which can be enormous – if the topic is 50k replies long, it includes 50k ids in a list in every request. Longer term…

Note this “auto closing” helps keep Discourse performance high.

The setting you might be interested in is:
“auto close topics post count”

[cpradio]

Admin > Settings > search for auto close topics post count

[ossia (Quincy Larson)]

auto close topics post count

Great! Thank you for pointing out that this option existed. Based on @DeanMarkTaylor’s explanation, I will leave this as default.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

It can be OK, but older Mobile devices and particularly older Android devices will be severely punished performance wise on topics with a lot more than 10k posts.

We do plan to eventually fix this, but it may take a year or more.

[ossia (Quincy Larson)]

OK - thanks for the additional information. I will just plan to open new threads when they hit 10k comments.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

2 years later @ossia how is the new limit fairing on your forum?

[ossia (Quincy Larson)]

Thanks for following up, Sam.

This hasn’t been an issue for us at all.

We stopped using “introduce yourself” threads, and since then, few of our threads have even approached the 1,000 comment mark, so I think 10,000 is a sane default.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

We stopped using “introduce yourself” threads,

It’s fine to break this up by year or even every few years. A 10 year old introduction isn’t quite… right.