As far as performance issues, even if topics of over 10,000 posts are problematic for their software, I can’t see any reason that a private message thread of over 500 posts would be worse than a public thread of the same size, so I would definitely hope that they’ll be responsive on that point. The reasons they gave for limiting private threads on the linked meta.discourse thread were all about what they consider ideal behavior, which should be for individual forums to determine.
Edit: They launched a new topic on the meta.discourse site about the restriction on 10,000+ topics, although there appears to have been no mention of the much harsher restriction on private messages in that thread.
And yeah, with lack of pagination, I suppose the other issue I’ve noticed is that it makes it much harder to archive a Discourse thread—is there any easy way to do so?
Oh Somehow I had the idea this was referencing some even that had happened on the forum, instead
If something significant has changed, start a new topic, and link to the old one. Instead of adding to the “Diablo III” topic, create a new “Diablo III – Reaper of Souls” topic to cover the game’s latest expansion and patches with the changes to the core game as a result. When discussing the New England Patriots, if the team’s lineup has changed dramatically rather than posting in a catch-all topic.
For big timeline events, consider creating a new topic. Big events are often worthy of their own topics. While some Nintendo Switch games might not be significant enough to warrant their own topic, a huge release like Smash Brothers certainly deserves a new “Smash Brothers on Switch” topic where people interested in that can easier find it, versus being buried deep in the general Nintendo Switch catch-all topic. This can be linked both to and from the general Switch topic as needed, of course, and now it can be found easier via search as a standalone topic.
So, I guess no more off-topic “Games” or “Music” topics?
This deserves a full-sized card… folks interested in this issue should pay close attention to this post from the Discourse team.
WDYT? Should we have split those megatopic threads up into smaller threads? The megatopics on this board have little coherency or direction. Is that OK? Is that desirable? Nobody expects to get “caught up” on old posts in the thread… so does it matter if the thread gets rebooted from time to time?
When the threads are singular IP’s that are games in the CoG and HG libraries: Yes it matters. ymmv.
Edit:
As an involved contributor and author of two of the biggest “megatopic threads” (Guns of Infinity and Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven) on this forum, I’m going to push back on this.
The consistency, coherency and direction of these threads are reinforced by their composition and size. For both fans and the developers/authors, looking back at past discussions help with the future development and writing of the IP.
This is true, regardless if the thread is public or private - and in the case of PMs it actually is more important.
Justification by Discourse to validate their view that they want to keep servicing outdated and archiac Oses like pas Android does not fit the fact pattern as played out in the “wild” as they put it here.
I feel like I have an easier time looking at the main page if there are fewer threads, rather than splitting them into mini-topics. Fewer titles to look at, making it easier to find ones that interest or are relevant to me. I don’t know how true this is for other users, of course.
I would also like to see what they have to say about the private thread limit; 500 posts is nowhere near a megatopic.
I spent all afternoon on a PM thread with the Discourse team trying to tell them why megatopics matter. As you can see from their public post, they’re not at all convinced. I don’t think anyone on the Discourse team thinks megatopics are ever a good idea.
They argue that (for example) @Cataphrak should reboot the Guns of Infinity thread frequently, summarizing it with a “where stuff is at now” post. What’s wrong with that? (Maybe it would even get its own sub-category.)
Sorry for the repeat - I will pause a bit before replying next to give everyone a chance to catch up.
So, CoG will open a sub-fora(forum?) for each and every title in both the CoG and HG library?
If this is the case, then I feel the change is more acceptable. Something like what was done for Sergi’s Hero Rise works.
If not, then there are a whole host of issues that will end up being divisive beyond words and will harm the community… I’ve seen this happen elsewhere and do not want to see it happen here.
I would appreciate mega-threads that are easier to sort through, myself. (Milestones? Chapters? Pure chronology? Some kind of housekeeping sounds good to me.) I mostly don’t participate in the larger threads because I can’t keep up, particularly if I’ve been away for a bit and want to reorient myself.
I also appreciated Discourse’s point about chatrooms being a really fabulous catch-all for long and possibly rambling discussions—although I may be biased there because I personally get a lot out of the unofficial CS Discord channel. But I could definitely see Discourse’s point about chatrooms working well as a complement to forums; both have advantages that the other lacks.
500 does still seem very low for active PMs, though, especially for a very lively beta.
The Discourse team says that it’s not worth a shot, because megatopics are so rare that it’s not worth the engineering effort to fix them. (“Why can’t CoG just reboot four measly megatopics? Why is this worth weeks or perhaps months of work on our end?”)
I’m not super well educated on the adverse effects super long threads will have for other members and readers in general, but reading their whole thing it rears like:
We’re shortening threads. You can’t have it too long. Plus, barely anyone has it long, so it’s fine. And hey, the majority of long thread’s are just people getting off topic or spamming, so we’re helping you, because your mods and leaders can’t do that yourself.
And on the tiiiiiny chance you do have a long thread with relevant discussion, well now you’re being selfish as it slows down xyz or makes xyz happen to zyx
I don’t think you’ll be able to talk them out of it because I think only one of those reasons is the real reason, the rest us just justification and stuff
Just to check, though, for the record, it wouldn’t take extra engineering effort to make the PM limitation be in line with the public thread limit, would it?
I definitely appreciate and agree with this point of Eiwynn’s:
This would make private discussions really choppy, and make it harder to reference previous comments, and maintain the flow of discussion. And, for comparison, just check out post counts on WiPs; many of them easily pass the 500 mark, sometimes quite quickly.
Because the measly topics in question involve the most dedicated and purchasing customers of particular IPs … The people in @Cataphrak’s thread are fanatically loyal to him and his games not only purchasing multiple copies but willing to be “must purchase” customers of new titles as they are released.
@Seraphinite’s Wayheaven’s thread - well on its way to becoming such a megathread kept the fanbase here occupied and under control when the release date for the Chronicles was delayed several times …
Why do they insist on servicing outdated tech and software Oses that become non-supported by their producers?
Better yet, why not let their customers decide whether to support it or not? As they say here:
So, they informed us and now we still desire the opportunity to have mega threads if we desire. Enabling the on-off switch should not be that difficult to do.
I’m with discourse - mega-topics should be branched and rebooted at X number of posts. Links to follow on threads can be edited into first posts and key information can be posted or linked to in the first post of follow-on threads.
Being stubborn about this helps no-one and this isn’t about servicing outdated tech or operating systems if Discourse are saying that it’s likely a red herring.
That said I don’t think they made a smart choice by dynamically extended pages as you scroll with javascript so I’d question other choices they made in terms of backend server setup and coding choices which may be reflecting on performance issues they may be seeing.
Having said all the above - if people really want to blindly charge ahead with mega-threads you should probably go the self-hosted route rather than relying on the shared platform offered by Discourse - the code couild be patched to behave however desired at that point.
I’m going to state their major reason for this limit:
So, yes, according to their repeated statements, both in threads years old and now, the most important thing for them is to allow older tech to access the forums without performance issues.
I’m sorry you believe I am being stubborn (why do you always take things to a personal level?) but this is my paying customer base in the community that is being messed with.
This affects the public threads, the private testing threads and the personal networking PM threads I have with them and others of this community.
We will have to agree to disagree on restarting threads, it’s not as simple as you desire to make it out to be.
Providing separate sub-fora(forums?) for each title might be an alternative but @dfabulich has not commented on this option yet.
Self-hosting and such as the solution may not be an alternative for 99% of Hosted Games authors and frankly puts one more hurdle/disadvantage in place for them to overcome and be successful. CoG pays a lot of the costs for CoG titles that HG authors have to pay themselves… adding more costs to the HG author (especially non-established new authors) only harms the publisher themselves.
Edit: Perhaps the solution is for CoG to become an “enterprise customer” so the on-off toggle can be reinstated?
To me this defeats their reasoning entirely - in fact, now it seems like more of a money-grab by putting something that was not behind a paywall behind one suddenly.
For our hosted customers this is suppressed unless you are an enterprise customer. Allowing megatopics in our multisite cluster causes performance problems so we just restricted this. Note, we do plan to change it so you can increase the PM limit up to 10k.
Personally, I’m not a fan of multi-part serial threads, mostly because they add confusion when they have to be inevitably rebooted, and make it more difficult for new arrivals to join in.
I’d honestly prefer a sub-forum for The Dragoon Saga within the Hosted Games category, especially since that would make it easier for fans to split individual discussions into individual threads, instead of staying within one massive collective stream-of-consciousness which, while entertaining, is rather difficult to navigate. Asubforum with individual queries and discussions split into smaller dedicated threads would make life a lot easier for anyone with a lore question which might have already been answered somewhere already.
Frankly, it’d make my life easier too, since it’d mean fewer people would be pressing me for answers to lore questions I’d already answered at some point because they didn’t want to go through 60 000 posts in a single thread looking for the answer.
I’m speaking purely from opinion here. I’m not sure how feasible it’d be for “established” series with a lot of discussion to get their own subfora, but if it is in any way possible, I’d love to get one.
I am speaking and arguing in general terms here. There is more than one person posting in this thread with the impression that Discourse cannot dictate how their service operates. It really isn’t as difficult as people are making out to split mega-topics over multiple smaller threads with a cutoff point of 10k posts or less. It is precisely as simple as I make it out to be.
By self-hosting, I was referring to CoG self-hosting a Discourse instance (or some other forum) rather than each author doing so.
Becoming an Enterprise customer might move CoG onto a standalone setup rather than a shared setup. When doing things on the cheap certain compromises must be made. I can believe that it may be both a money grab and a result of metrics reporting across monitored server clusters driving the change.
That said if you want extra resources to handle mega threads you should probably expect to pay for those resources if you insist on having the ability to have any number of mega threads.
I do not believe Discourse are being unreasonable with the limits, they could certainly stand to have better communications with upcoming changes though. The unreasonable expectation is to be able to have any number of threads with an unlimited post count.
Somehow I had the idea this was referencing some even that had happened on the forum, instead 
