You can do non-onebox links like this
https://meta.discourse.org/t/unfortunately-i-had-to-pull-the-plug/117508/1
https://meta.discourse.org/t/unfortunately-i-had-to-pull-the-plug/117508/2
etc
But yeah. If an OP could be tagged as “contents list” and auto generate that stuff, it might be useful.
It’s moreso that only people looking to read the types of threads we have that get that big would ever put in the effort to do so.
The problem with that is it only works if you’re going for breaks based on post count, not actual post content.
How does that differ from having page numbers though? If there’s 50 posts per page over 10k then as you’ve said you have 200 references that don’t go to anywhere contextual. If the issue in fact is “huge unwieldy topics” then someone who cares enough about the content needs to segment it and if no one cares enough to make it legible throw it away.
It would be nice to have a means to do a TOC that spanned into other people’s posts down the navigation line though, that would be epic.
The difference is you don’t have 10,000 posts on one page slowing things down and crashing your browser, and you can point people to a specific page.
At the very least, the option to enable pages on some level would be extremely welcome.
Thanks for the detailed report! Sorry things did not work out.
As for the 502 errors, it sounds like the server was under-powered for the database size? How many posts, topics and users were there, and what were the cpu, ram, and disk stats of your server? You’d also want to use a CDN for a large site to reduce load.
I hear you, i’m not fighting your desires but for the discourse staff etc imo a means to somehow integrate staff/High trust controlled bookmarks next to the nav timeline would be baller.
I agree that would work, which is why I have brought it up before and again here.
There are pretty much the two options discussed above for minimal-work management of megathreads - pages or direct timeline control. Being able to push a button to mark posts directly on the timeline scroll bar thingy and attach them to the bottom of the OP would be very welcome. So would the ability to enable pages. Both in combination would be amazing. But right now, neither exist, and pages seem easier to implement, are more familiar, and could also benefit from future timeline improvements.
One thing I’ve seen on a non-Discourse forum is the ability for staff or approved users to mark posts as important.
When I return to a discussion thread at a later date, the important posts that have been made since I last visited are neatly presented to me just above the point I jumped back to. Very useful.
In Discourse that could be on the timeline in some way as well as going into the TOC OP.
That’s the question, right? Have you looked into how the feature works?
Honestly no, I have not.
I cannot stand paging. It’s so 1990. So PHPBB 
Topics of 20,000 posts are a big ball-ache for members of online communities IMO. If a forum has developed a topic with 20,000 posts, it means the forum has become a chatroom. And that’s not good, given that forums are intended for long-term, organised content, as opposed to transient feed-like chatter.
Discourse has the “summarise” button to avoid users having to wade through every post of a mega-topics, and Discourse allows sophisticated moderation. There are plenty of ways to avoid mega-topics, and it sometimes takes a firm hand by the admins in setting out the goals of the forum, and explaining to users the benefits of well-organised content. It’s worth it, though.
None of our massive threads are chatrooms.
Here’s a good example, this topic has 1700 posts.
Summarized it’s reduced to the 100 replies based on the underlying interaction stats which Discourse collects.
It’s incredibly effective at cutting through the cruft.
The tools already exist to make consuming or managing large topics quite straightforward. Not even trying the feature undermines any criticisms or calls for alternatives.
OTOH, if you try it and dislike it then there’s an opportunity to provide feedback on posts which were picked up or missed. You can help make the feature more useful and relevant to everyone.
Maybe. Regardless, no topic needs to be 20,000 responses either. Creating serialised topics or just daily topics achieves the same thing, and Discourse being Discourse a bidirectional link between them is maintained when the new topic links back to the old.
Heck, if you’re really determined you can automate that process, but it really shouldn’t be necessary.
Thanks for that. I wasn’t aware of Summarise.
While I do entirely agree with this point, and will be doing such moving forwards, I think the fact that I’ve been using Discourse on the daily for two years now and never once knew what exactly this does speaks to a poor explanation of the feature next to the button to activate it. It sounds like you would just offer to type up a summary. 
My immediate reaction to trying it out is that the OP/mods/TL3+ should be able to add posts manually.
They should also not count towards the 100 auto-generated posts - that’s still less than 1% of all posts in a 10,000+ post topic, a fine number but still a fraction of the total info.
Same problem with me. Its kinda confuse that you need to click in button inside editor.
