Limit of posts per topic -- We're working on it!

Meta
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The Discourse team rolled out a change intended to help with performance, which automatically closes public threads that are larger than a certain size. The Guns of Infinity topic was locked for this reason.

When moderators or administrators try to re-open the topic, it just re-locks itself. :frowning:

We’re dealing with a few bugs in Discourse here; Discourse Support has said that they’re working on it/investigating.

  1. Discourse Support tells us that the limit is really 10,000 posts, even though the message says “200.” They’ve apparently fixed that error in an upcoming build of Discourse.

  2. Discourse provides an option to change the “auto close messages post count” limit, but it doesn’t work. Discourse Support says that @sam_saffron will investigate. (Go Sam!)

a) Discourse says that the limit can be disabled by setting it to 0, but I tried that, and it still re-auto-locked the Guns topic.
b) I also tried setting it to 20,000,000 posts, and it incorrectly said that the Guns topic had more than 20M posts, which is not true yet. :wink:

  1. The reason they’re trying to cap topic size is explained in a topic on the Discourse Meta forum. Discourse Support explained to us that it’s a big performance problem for them to handle so many posts in a single topic, that it makes the topic unusably slow on mobile, and they plan to fix that “long term” but not right away.

(I dunno. The Guns topic looks fine for me on my iPhone 6S ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

That’s all the news we have right now. Hold tight!

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Worst comes to worst, I could always start a new topic.

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Yeah, the GoI thread worked perfectly fine on my Nokia Lumia.

But I guess it was inevitable, in a way. GoI was already released and @Cataphrak will/has start/started on the Cryptkeepers of Hallowford, it was bound to die down at some point.

Of course, when LoI comes around…

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You know, if you want to just start a second one until its fixed, we can technically remerge them after we can remove the cap again

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You’re most likely already aware but it also seems to arbitrarily close down PM conversations.

It ate “Monsters of New Haven High” for example cause it didn’t like me.

Never experienced any troubles with it myself either.

So Cryptkeepers thread soon-ish, or are you required to keep that under wraps until it is released as it is an official CoG title?

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Honestly, I think huge threads are causing performance issues because Discourse uses the endless-scrolling system. If threads were split into pages, with each page limited to X many posts but no limit on posts per thread, it would be fine.

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Yep pagination support, kind of sad it is gone myself.
Then again getting rid of pagination was apparently a central theme when Discourse was first conceived so…

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Yes that setting applies to private messages, the setting you are looking for is auto_close_topics_post_count, I went ahead and set it to 0 so it does not apply.

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So, they were setting themselves up for failure from the beginning? Haha I’m kidding

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I’ll be putting out a call for beta-testers in a few weeks, once I get the first few chapters done, but no open WIP thread.

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I’ve seen this from other forum software writers; I was surprised this was not already in force here.

I do hope they solve the issue and get the software efficiency up to 1m. One of the strengths of this writing community is that our communication threads can go great lengths.

The only thing that worries me is that “long term” is as precise a term as “soon”.

Edit: Will this mean @jeantown 's Guenevere topic will be closed as well?