# Capping number of replies in topics, whats the experience in your community?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911
**Category:** UX
**Created:** [6월 4, 2017, 5:16오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911 "2017-06-04T17:16:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [6월 4, 2017, 5:16오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/1 "2017-06-04T17:16:44Z")
Curious to hear other admin perspectives on reply caps in your communities? i have found that entering a long topic for the first time can be overwhelming, at the same time I dont want to interfere with the discussion that may be taking place. But I would like to encourage users to break into new topics where relevant.
Any thoughts or experiences to share? What do you have your max reply count set to?
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [6월 4, 2017, 7:14오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/2 "2017-06-04T19:14:33Z")
I tend to agree that extremely long mega topics start to be absurd. How do you search them? Who actually reads them? We have a 10,000 reply limit for performance reasons (it is a long story, but a list of all ID numbers in a topic is sent down to the client) but I am begining to think that default limit makes sense across the board even if we resolved the underlying performance issue.
It’s generally helpful to have _some_ sense of time scope in a topic title anyway, as previously discussed
> [@Is there a topic post limit?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-topic-post-limit/60955/3):
>
> Usually a date range is helpful here in the topic title like NFL teams chat 2015 or Arsenal is the best! Nov 2015 or Gardening progress, Spring 2013 And of course you can use categories or tags (or just a common identical topic title minus dates) to tie them together.
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### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [6월 6, 2017, 2:37오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/3 "2017-06-06T02:37:08Z")
Thx for the input. So does a topic closed by reaching the limit, look just like a regular closed topic? Just wanted to see if there’s a place I can check it out, before I consider turning on this feature.
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### Author:  [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [6월 6, 2017, 8:23오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/4 "2017-06-06T08:23:19Z")
It appears just like any other closed topic
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### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [6월 6, 2017, 10:30오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/5 "2017-06-06T10:30:50Z")
Thx for the info. Not sure if that might be jrring for new users who land on the topic and dont know where to go. We have some very popular long topics. Perhaps I can leave manual comments at the end of those and also update the close text to encourage users to cisit the category to start a new topic with their comments or questions
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### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [6월 6, 2017, 10:41오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/6 "2017-06-06T10:41:35Z")
Running a survey on our community now to see what users think
[https://www.helloforos.com/t/auto-cierre-temas-mas-largos-que-200-respuestas/271684](https://www.helloforos.com/t/auto-cierre-temas-mas-largos-que-200-respuestas/271684)
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### Author:  [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [6월 6, 2017, 12:02오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/7 "2017-06-06T12:02:07Z")
> [@charleswalter](#):
>
> Not sure if that might be jrring for new users who land on the topic and dont know where to go.
You could edit the copy for that particular closing message and add a hint that/how users can create a new topic.
Admittedly, though, explaining how to “reply as new topic” might be a bit much. Maybe it is somehow possible to actually add a “reply as new topic” link in the copy?
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### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [6월 7, 2017, 7:56오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/8 "2017-06-07T19:56:04Z")
So, this request may be difficult to fulfill, but the basic response I got from my community is that they are okay with capping in some categories, but in other categories, they don’t want to be capped.
Not sure if this could be considered as a category-level option to apply a max post limit (or allow the max post limit to be ignored).
Basically, we have certain categories where users are more likely to use them for personal image galleries or writing stories. And the idea of being capped seems unreasonable. They have been the more vocal group against the change.
For the time being, I’m planning to manually close some key topics which I see have gotten way too long to read.
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### Author:  [@matzeztam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/matzeztam)
#### Post date: [10월 20, 2018, 7:08오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/9 "2018-10-20T19:08:48Z")
Is there a way for an admin to change it to a limit of 2k or lower?
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [10월 21, 2018, 6:23오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/10 "2018-10-21T06:23:05Z")
See
> [@The MEGATOPIC: public good, or public menace?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-megatopic-public-good-or-public-menace/85592):
>
> When we founded Discourse in 2013, I had the idea that we’d support topics of any length or size, from 10 replies to 100 to 10,000 to 100,000 or even more! A few years ago we ran into a technical limitation where we send down a list of all the post IDs in the topic when you enter the topic. This starts to cause problems on the client – particularly older smartphones with less memory and CPU power – at around ~10,000 replies, so we created a site setting that automatically closes topic…
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### Author:  [@charleswalter](https://meta.discourse.org/u/charleswalter)
#### Post date: [10월 21, 2018, 11:43오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911/11 "2018-10-21T11:43:43Z")
Just to note on my experiment. Even though we moved the topic into its own category, users just wnded up starting a new mega long topic in the thread.
The thread is questions on applying for visas. The concern i had is that new questions were being added to the same topic without clear visibility
I will say my concern on long topics is less on capping and more on that new users dont realize the flow of going back to the category to start a new topic.
We have a tremendous amount of traffic that comes from search engines, so users may not be accustomed to the format and the best way of asking Their question