This would still be REALLY useful to have, and I can’t see any reason to disable it, so I assume it’s a bug.
No, this is intentional to reduce server load. It is not advisable to allow topics to grow without bound. You are creating a de facto chat room with infinite history.
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Sorry if I’m entirely new to this, hut how does having the “Frequent Posters” thing continue past the seemingly arbitrary limit of 10,000 cause increased server load? Does the “Frequent Posters” thing poll the entire topic post by post every time the page is loaded or something?
Yes, server load gets exponentially higher with large topics. We put in some basic mitigations (you’ll note that dates don’t appear on the timeline, etc) but it’s still expensive.
In general megatopics are not a good idea, so removing features to mitigate the performance disaster they cause, while simultaneously discouraging their use … is very much something we will continue to do. Read here to learn why.
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Would it not make more sense to just cache data such as the number of posts per user server-side for larger topics so users don’t need to poll every post in a topic once you reach 10,000 posts?
Or is there some reason simply storing this kind of data in one batch and altering it serverside as each new post is made rather than actively polling every single post each time you load the topic doesn’t work?
Is that a byproduct of having the ability to jump everywhere within a topic, so needing to be able to pull up any post at a given time?
And, if so, would not enabling pages make sense for large topics?
Or am I fundamentally off target somewhere?
Thanks!
Technically we could invest even more time in making megatopics more efficient and possibly move to a system where we cache frequent posters poisoning the cache every single time you modify the topic (for example by posting to it)… but we are simply not motivated to make such changes at the moment.
The number of megatopics in the wild is minuscule, investing large amount of time optimising this means we have less time working on features which are much more commonly needed.
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That makes perfect sense.
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