Why The Greatest Page stops at 15 rec

[question everything]

when a post gets there after 5?

[EarlG]

1. It doesn't stop at 15 recs

It stops at a certain number of threads. On DU3 the Greatest Page shows every single recced thread with 5 recs or more. This can create an extremely long page which can be slow to load. On DU4 we opted to restrict the number of threads on the page to 90.

If you change the "Started within" dropdown from its default (24 hours) to 12 hours, you'll see 5-rec threads at the bottom of the list.

[highplainsdem]

2. ??? I just checked, and it seems to take only a second or so to load,

so including the Greatest threads with lower total counts should add only a fraction of a second to that.

Please change it back so all the threads with 5 recs are included again. Otherwise you're likely to see a lot of OPs asking why a thread that should be on the Greatest page isn't.

And some people here might mostly skim the Greatest page, and if that 90-thread cut-off point is there, they could miss a thread that's recently posted and getting a lot of attention, and has 5 or more recs, but hasn't yet hit whatever constantly shifting # of recs is necessary at that particular moment.

I'm really uncomfortable with DUers not knowing how many recs a thread might need to hit the Greatest page.

Especially if the only worry is a split-second delay.

Have people complained about the Greatest page loading slowly?

[highplainsdem]

3. And it just occurred to me that if you limit the # of threads,

you're almost inevitaby going to have a situation where one or more threads with the same # of recs as the 90th thread - if that's your limit - will not show up on the Greatest page. Which seems unfair to those threads, since it denies them equal attention.

And if there's a limit of 90, threads could appear on and disappear from and reappear on the Greatest page during the day, rather than staying on it till they're more than 24 hours old.

[EarlG]

4. We can probably expand the limit, I'll look into it

I should point out though that the Greatest Page on DU4 has simply switched sides from the way it is on DU3. On DU3, the Greatest Page shows rec'd threads by time on the left, and rec'd threads by number of recommendations on the right. On the DU4 Greatest Page, it's flipped -- on the right side of the screen you can still see all the most recently recommended threads. So threads with 5 recs will show up there (at the top in fact).

You can get other views by clicking the "Most recent," "Most replies," and "Last replied" buttons at the top. This is particularly useful on mobile where the right column is not displayed. On mobile, the Greatest Page is pretty much the same on DU3 and DU4 -- it shows rec'd threads by highest number of recommendations, and you have to click a button to see the most recent recommendations.

Anyway as I said, we'll look into expanding it.

[highplainsdem]

5. Thanks for being willing to expand the limit. But I believe you'll

still run into problems if you don't simply display all the threads with 5 or more recs on the Greatest page, in the column with threads by descending # of recs.

Again, if you display only a set # of threads, while 5 recs is enough to qualify for the Greatest page, you're inevitably going to leave some threads off the page that have the same number of recs as the thread with the lowest # of recs on the page.

Which will mean question after question about why someone's thread with X # of recs isn't there.

I don't know what kind of system you have in place to decide automatically which threads with that lower # of recs will be allowed on the Greatest page, and which will be excluded. Even if your software will automatically sort through the threads with, say, 12 recs - I think that was the cutoff when I checked last - and bump the newer ones off the page or not allow them on, it's still going to seem unfair to DUers with the same number of recs for a post if theirs isn't appearing on the Greatest page, but an OP posted one minute earlier is.

If recs count for anything, then ALL those with 5 recs should be on the Greatest page.

And again, I'm wondering if any DUers are having trouble with the Greatest page loading slowly. I can't recall ever seeing a complaint about it on the board. I don't have particularly fast wireless, but it's always loaded as fast as any other DU page for me.

If you simply want to limit the # of threads on the Greatest page, you could always require more recs. Maybe 10 recs. But that would not only likely be unpopular, it would probably just result in people reccing threads much more often to get them closer to 10 recs.