A couple of pages? That only makes sense if its a thread with two pages.

If you want to reply to a thread with a thousand posts, would you really rather read the entire 1000 posts, or go to the most recent thread and read a short summary of what has been said, and then write your reply?

It would be closed quicker than you could snap your fingers.


There would be virtually no difference than with the 200 limit, no advantage and confuse things.

Hah, it is a no win situation - if we removed the post limit then there would be topics asking for it to be returned, if we leave it, we have topics like this. The moderators and admin do discuss this and the latest discussion resolved to it not being changed.

That's assuming there's even a summary to read which isn't the norm. The only reliable way to see what's going on is to read the most recent posts and the first posts.

Also, I forgot to mention on the things that were broken by the split : polls because their results aren't carried back into the next thread.

A shame. I just hope you'll get rid of this annoying "tradition" one day For myself it really makes this forum a lot more annoying to read than other forums without such limit and I'm unconvinced that it has any benefit at all.

I actually don't see whats wrong with it?
Once it hits 200 or just above a new thread is created and usually linked inside the old one, so its no more different than changing page.

Well, I just posted it above :

All that having cutoff points make is :
- greatly stifle any discussion that was going on at that point
- make quoting messages from before the cut a pain
- promote offtopics discussion about the event itself
- make it THAT much harder to find information since you need to hunt all the tiny pieces and search inside instead of searching once (hint, there's a tool called "Search inside this thread" that doesn't follow through other chunks)
- litter the forum with locked threads
- make the "Follow this topic" tool rather ineffective
And I added that one later :
- makes you lose all poll progress when the thread included one

200 is pointless. It should be page limit, not post limit.

Those were the only two good points from that I felt could make a change. Even at that they could just script it to allow tagging of quotes in locked topics.

"promote offtopics discussion about the event itself" - Isn't it againist the rules though to talk about threads that have been locked, it doesn't actually promote anything if the user is mature enough to move onto the next thread.

We should get some of the programming gurus here to create IP Board scripts which would allow you to quote posts in locked threads and extend polls between threads.

Do we really have to have this same thread every few months?

Yeah, page 7 seems so arbitrary. Bring back page 10 lock

Page 6 and 2/3. Oh the madness.

Considering there's barely no threads asking to lock big threads in other forums but there is here, yeah I think it'll happen If not only for the fact every month some new user comes here and gets face to face with that rule while he got used to infinite threads on other forums.
And not the part about it breaking the in thread search tool? I guess you don't use it because it's kinda useless since there's no big threads for it to matter


Anyway, why couldn't we do it in a progressive way? There's already some threads that don't get locked down. Maybe the moderators could make an experiment and not lock threads in a subforum or maybe even some specific threads and see if all hell breaks lose?

Infinitely long threads in not a good thing. We had a thread that was 60 pages long on the demon's souls wiki forum.... Yeah, I honestly wish they'd have 200 post limit in there. Or some kind of post limit.

But why that? I mean, if you don't want to read the thread, don't read it. If you want to read the thread, all the thread, then it's easier when you don't have to hunt for the little pieces. And if you want only to read the most recent posts, just do it. It's easier with a huge thread too in case the split was very recent.

But saying "I don't want to read big threads so nobody should be allowed to make big threads" is weird

I think 200 is ok, I never had any problems with it, 1000 is way too much I could agree to 300.

No that's completely reasonable. Big threads have an obvious downside, which is that most people won't read the entire thing.

The only negative thing I can think of for small threads is what has already been mentioned, i.e. you can't quote posts in locked topics and it can break polls.

In my opinion, it's better to have those little annoyances than risk alienating newcomers by allowing threads to become huge.

Not really a big thing, this post limit, but there has been quite a number of good discussions over the years that felt they'd still go on for a page or two but just got killed due to the 200 post limit. Uninteresting topics usually die out on their own or get off topic lockworthy way before the 200 post limit.

Sometimes the interesting discussions just start near the limit and never really get going fully, as there's rarely enough interest to start a new thread which prompts to go to the previous to see what the new one is all about.

I know for sure that this limit did cut many threads that were close to completion because a split happened at the wrong time and were left

What about the risk of alienating newcomers with the annoyance of thread locking when they were used to other forums where they don't do it? Objection overruled.


Besides, go to the PC technical forum and there's a STICKY thread with 52 pages right now so any newcomer already is exposed to big threads.

I generally don't use the search inside a topic because...well 7 pages isn't hard to wade through. The 35-ish pages, your 1000 post limit, would make would be too long to wade through and even read.
Sure they could, but they won't because it's predictable that all hell would break loose.

That 60 pages wasn't a big discussion, it was just questions with answers. Page after page after page. The questions would repeat themselves time after time after time and well, let's just say that question threads work best with a title.

It's not my suggestion. I'd not put any page limit at all myself. As for reading a 35 page post being too long. Well what do you do right now on threads that won't stop despite the locks? You only read the last chunk. For the 35 page post it's the same, you only read the last 7 pages and that's all. It isn't

Better having them in a single thread than having people create a new thread for that question once per week or something. And in all cases, I don't see what is has to do with the issue at hand. It's not because the thread is in a single block rather than split in 200 post threads that would have caused people to repost the same questions again and again.



Also, it's not because you got a couple examples of big threads that didn't turn well that you should reject the notion. It's shouldn't be too hard to find the opposite here : threads that were cut somewhat at the wrong moment and the discussion just died while it was nearing completion.

I'm ok with bigger threads, but not infinitely long. 10 pages of 30 posts each is a good amount.

I really don't see the issue. I've always liked it, if I came to the forum and saw a page 20+ pages long, I'd never read any of it. Whilst I miss the neatness 10 pages gave the forum, 200 still works.

Geez, you don't want to read them, you don't open them! It's not that hard.