[qwasty]

"all" option for viewing entire thread instead of one page at a time would be handy for skimming through some of the threads that are starting to grow.

[qwasty]

I'd still like to see this feature become available, since some of the threads are continuing to grow.

[snowball]

Done!   

[qwasty]

Cool, thanks. It looks like you've made the number of posts per page larger too, which is good. Since that's larger, there's no "all" option yet to try out. Can I ask how many posts will be shown before it'll paginate and give us an "all" option, along with page numbers? The settings should be under "Number of posts per page in a topic page" here, if your SMF version is the same as mine:

http://china-mint.info/forum/index.php?action=postsettings;sa=topics

Here's the settings I use on my copy of SMF:

Time before topic is warned as old on reply (?): 0
Number of topics per page in the message index: 500
Number of posts per page in a topic page: 15

Number of posts for a hot topic (?): 15
Number of posts for a very hot topic (?): 25

Max topic size to show "All" posts (?): 9999
Enable previous/next topic links (?): checked

The reason why I set "Number of topics per page in the message index" to 500 and "Number of posts per page in a topic page" to only 15 is because it's optimal to show as many interesting topics to a user as practical, and then letting the user choose how many posts to view, depending on how interested in the topic they are. It allows people to find stuff they'd like to read about, but won't overburden the server, or their bandwidth, if it turns out the users don't want to read the whole thing all at once. Keep in mind that showing lots of posts automatically by default will load all the images in the topic at the same time! That's why I prefer to make it paginate with an "All" option so users can load all that up if they want to.

I set "Max topic size to show "All" posts (?)" to a very high 9999 to make sure that users can always see all posts if they choose to. This is OK to do until the forum gets very busy with many users continuously. Then, you'd want to change it to 500 to 1000 or something like that, because most users won't try to read that many posts all at once - though they might need to do that to search for something in the text. I would then also change "Number of posts per page in a topic page:" from 15 to perhaps 50 or so, if things got busy.

Also, could you please change "Time before topic is warned as old on reply" to 0 to disable it? Since we talk a lot about history, and we're still doing the research on it, many old topics are going to warrant replies long after they were originally posted. There's no point in warning people away from old topics in a history-oriented forum :)

[snowball]

qwasty

Here is the new setting:

Time before topic is warned as old on reply (?): 0 to disable  days 
Number of topics per page in the message index:  100  topics 
Number of posts per page in a topic page:  75 posts 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Number of posts for a hot topic (?):  10 posts 
Number of posts for a very hot topic (?): 20  posts 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Max topic size to show "All" posts (?): 200 posts 


It should be good for now.   

[qwasty]

This part, "Max topic size to show "All" posts (?): 200 posts" means that if there's more than 200 posts, the option to view all will disappear. That means that you will rarely see the "all" option, only in the small window when you have 76 to 199 posts.

Those posts will be listed with an "all" option in only a maximum of 3 pages: 1 to 75 posts for page 1, 76 to 150 posts for page 2, 151 to 199 posts for page 3, then the all option. Since the settings you have restrict the "all" option to only 3 pages, it's unlikely anyone will need to use it. If you set "Max topic size to show "All" posts (?):" to something much larger than 200 posts, you won't lose the "all" option so quickly.

If that's how you meant to set it up, then like you said, it's OK for now because the biggest thread we have is only 57 posts. I just wanted to make sure that you meant for the "all" option to be missing most of the time. These settings could have been better designed by the SMF team, since they're a little confusing. I've been using SMF for quite a while, and I still have to double check that it's doing what I meant for it to do.

[qwasty]

You can see an example of how it works with 41 posts on my copy of SMF here:

http://www.livebusinesschat.com/smf/index.php?topic=1706.0