eGullet Posted May 14, 2012 Posted May 14, 2012 Since our upgrade to 3.3 I've had a number of members complain about the lack of setting for number of posts per page to show. Is this setting (on a per user basis) still hiding away someplace, or is it completely gone? Any chance of getting it back? I don't want to increase it for all readers due to increased server load, but if 0.1% of my readers want to see 100 posts per page that won't affect anything, and it makes them happy.
Rimi Posted May 14, 2012 Posted May 14, 2012 Hello. This setting was removed and will not be returning as confirmed by IPS.
eGullet Posted May 14, 2012 Author Posted May 14, 2012 Got a link to their post on the matter, by any chance?
Ryan Williams Posted May 22, 2012 Posted May 22, 2012 A community I frequent has some members unhappy about this feature being absent after switching from vBulletin, and I myself have used it numerous times in the past. I'm about to switch my own community to IP.Board and I can see the complaints already. I appreciate that IPS probably had some kind of discussion about this and a design decision was made, but this is a very fundamental forum feature that is essentially an industry standard — it's not far off removing the CC fields in an email client for the sake of streamlining. If feedback is considered seriously for adding new features, why not retaining old ones? I'll probably be happy if there's a well-supported hook or something that provides this functionality (Is there?), but I just can't see why this wouldn't be a toggle in the settings. At the very least people should be able to set in their user profile how many posts are shown by default, even if it's not available on a per-thread basis. Considering how many frivolous things are included and maintained officially in IP.Board it seems like madness to me that this isn't there and I had a genuine 'What the heck?' moment when I found out.
eGullet Posted May 23, 2012 Author Posted May 23, 2012 IPS's rationale is related to the way they form links to pages and posts: if you allow members to have different settings then one person's page two is another's page ten (for example). If one of those members tries to send a link to another member with a different setting by copying the link in their address bar, it won't work, and I have certainly gotten complaints about this issue in the past. There really isn't a clean way to deal with this problem except to do what Invision did, and remove the feature. The only alternative I can think of is to include the member's "posts per page" setting in the link itself, and have that override any setting the receiver of the link may have set.
Ryan Williams Posted May 27, 2012 Posted May 27, 2012 Agreed that it's a sticky issue. The solution you've proposed is actually what vBulletin has always done, but it does make URLs look significantly less clean and has search engine considerations too. But then, vBulletin is still the dominant software and its users expect this feature — if snagging vBulletin customers is a goal of IPS's then it is worthwhile reconsidering this problem. One thing to consider is that when people copy a thread URL they're usually only sending the link to the thread as a whole to someone; most people understand that to show someone a specific post they should click the post's anchor — you can do this in IPS by clicking the number in the top right of each post. Perhaps this could be modified so that if a user does have a custom post per page setting, instead of linking to the anchor it links to a new URI that includes the posts per page limit along with the anchor. That way the person can send a durable link without cluttering the board's URLs all the time. Food for thought, anyway. I personally don't use the feature but nobody likes the switch to exciting new software to be dampened by users complaining about much-used features being absent. :sad:
Management Matt Posted May 27, 2012 Management Posted May 27, 2012 We removed it so we can do away with the "st" variable for pagination and use the much better "page" variable name. It also prevents confusion when pasting links when the user had more posts set.
XTF Posted May 28, 2012 Posted May 28, 2012 We removed it so we can do away with the "st" variable for pagination and use the much better "page" variable name. You can easily have a page var *and* a custom per-user rows-per-page setting. I'd like to have a rows-per-page setting too.
One Sick Puppy Posted November 25, 2012 Posted November 25, 2012 Meh. I just installed IPB 3.x and I have to say that removing this feature is quite the sacrifice, and not at all worth it. Why would a URL be more important than such an important member preference? I'd like to hereby submit my wish to have this feature returned, no matter what the expense. I surprised that in the limitless possibilities that exist in web programing, that the "solution" Invision chose was to remove the feature instead of making it work... maybe Steve Jobs isn't really dead, and he's actually running Invision.
Black Six Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 I have people in my community who want this setting back as well.
bferne Posted October 9, 2013 Posted October 9, 2013 Necropost again, sorry. Does anyone know the status of this feature with respect to version 4? Other forums software have also had issues with page number representation in links, but the solution isn't removing the pagination feature, it's creating URLs that don't rely on page numbers in the first place. There are a few forums I visit where I would not continue to visit were I not able to change the thread display to show 100 posts - in other words, had they been running IPB, I'd probably no longer be an active member there. So far no one on the forum I run has complained about this, but that's besides the point - I'd like to adjust the setting for myself without changing it for everyone else.
bferne Posted September 18, 2014 Posted September 18, 2014 Did this ever get addressed? I'll be giving up my perpetual IPB license because of this and a few other issues that I simply don't feel like IP are taking seriously. One of the biggest issues being a tenable software development cycle and realistic release dates.
Bauforum24 Posted February 26, 2016 Posted February 26, 2016 Is this option available now in version 4?
Bauforum24 Posted June 24, 2016 Posted June 24, 2016 Our users want to have this feature back. Is it possible to get it back in 4.x ?
Tom_K Posted June 24, 2016 Posted June 24, 2016 I believe this feature was removed in v3 already. Matt explained the reasons in this very topic. On 27. 5. 2012 at 7:45 PM, Matt said: We removed it so we can do away with the "st" variable for pagination and use the much better "page" variable name. It also prevents confusion when pasting links when the user had more posts set. My understanding is that page X of certain topic is not page X for each user, if they have a different number of posts per page. When all users have the same number of posts per page, they also have the same number of pages in topic. You can however modify the number of posts per page for the whole board. Perhaps you and your users can reach a compromise on a number since I doubt IPS will be reintroducing this feature.
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