or at least untill you got 200 post on 1 page ?

'Cause it's easier to scroll down and read one page at a time, of reasonable length, than to have a single, colossal page to read with no easily accesible way to find that one post somewhere around there. Which otherwise and preferrably would be on page 3.

It's also easier on older or less powerful computing systems/browsers to be able to load a defined page length than to constantly load new info as one scrolls down.
I can't stand Twitter's constant time line scroll, especially since their servers are often laggy and unresponsive and you get "stuck" while trying to scroll down to see/load more.

This. It's also a nightmare to find a post that you knew was on page 4 on an infinite scroll, unless you know a keyword to search for.

Hmm. Pretty much every forum I've ever read is multi-paged. A single page could get pretty out of hand (especially for forums that don't have post limits. I've seen forum topics in other places with several thousand replies spread over 100+ pages. With embedded images in posts and sigs. )


Also, if it's a topic that you frequently go back to (say, for example, the Mass Effect thread), it's nice to be able to hit the "newest post" button and just load up a dozen or two replies to see the new stuff. Rather than loading an increasingly-long single page with 100+ replies on it. Much more organized, quicker load & scroll, much less memory used, etc.

Because Bethesda wants to annoy you with it's multiple pages until you post a thread asking us why. Bethesda has succeeded.

Because no sane person wants to scroll through 200 posts non-stop.

It helps reduce server load. Every time you open a page it loads 35 posts, but if the cap was at 200 the server would need to look up far more content for every page opened. Now if you're reading through a long thread the 200 post count might reduce the pages you ask for, but what if you're opening up a thread you've read several times before? Being able to skip to the last page means you're only asking for those 35 posts rather than a repeat of all of them.

The same reason you use periods after a sentence. It stops headaches.

Oh the madness it'd cause... Sheogorath would approve of 200 post long pages...

As well as hungry donner's explanation.