I don't like it. Ideally the articles should be displayed so that browsers don't need the entire page to be loaded before they start displaying stuff. How about either making the page loadable incrementally by using more smaller tables or something, or introducing a moderation thing like on slashdot so that the interesting stuff goes first?

Alternatively, maybe you could have a 'light' version available? This site really looks bad on Lynx :)

Just a few thoughts.
Ciaran

Good idea. I have a 33.6K modem and it gets pretty slow, BUT I would suggest to make it about 100 comments per page. You dont really need to use this split news feature on the news items. What you should use it for is the 'game ideas' and 'upcoming games' sections. Those take forever to load (usually around 5 minutes). I could see splitting the news into 2 parts if it has 200 or 300 comments but not into 8 parts or so. It just gets irritating when you split it up that much.

I would also like to say that if you split something more than two times, you should put page links at the bottom so thatyou dont have to go through 20 pages to see the newest comments.
So at the bottom of each page, you could have something like:

Goto Page: 1 2 3 4 5

i vote for this

You could do this by typing a period and the number of the page you want to go to before the .html. Yes, I know it's quite backward, but it does the trick.

We're just not grateful for anything, are we?

I kinda liked the old way better, even on a 56k. A 2 minute page download also gave me the chance to get up and stretch.

I used the time to either browse an already-downloaded page or do homework.

Same for me.

It's a good idea, but:

* let us choose which format we want. The new format works well for me right now since I have a dialup connection but multiple pages will be a pain in the @$$ next month when I get something faster.
* It should say how many pages there are and not just the number of comments.
* Each page should have a link to every other page, or at least a link to the most recent comment.
* Would it be possible for it to reload just the comments and not the news article when going to another page?

Erm, 0 comments remaining? Er, why? Er, surely this is a mistake? Is there any point having a link then? Just curious :)

Ciaran

Definitely some way to turn it off... or set the #... would be good.

the split mode is a good idea when you use a 5x86 133Mhz with 32Mb of ram and a 28k modem, under Netscape, Linux, wich uses 30 Mb of ram when web pages are very big

Why not just have virtual page splits where every 10 or so comments you have a new grey-table. Theoreticaly, visual appearance wouldn't be changed, and it would load incrementally, instead of all at once, this would solve both problems of download time and people complaining about the page thing.

Good idea, but it may not work very well for the intended purpose, which includes reducing browser crashes from huge pages. I think someone mentioned some sort of bug in a version of Netscape Navigator that causes the browser to crash on pages larger than one megabyte. I cannot confirm this, as I can't even get Netscape to work with aol. Perhaps someone else can confirm this.

I personally think it would work better having the virtual pages be each separate root thread. Making the gray a site background would also help.

Another option for dealing with long message boards would be frames. One frame, say on the left side of the window, lists the titles of each root comment for the threads, while a much larger frame displays the thread. The news item or survey could be in a small frame at the top of the window. However, I am not sure if all browsers support frames.

i think it's time for a new survey....