Latest post icon functionality

Jeff,
Would it be possible to get some dual functionality in the "latest post" icon for each thread?

Right now, if there are new posts, that icon takes you to the last one you have unread. If you've read the thread it takes you to the first post (which is where the thread title takes you).

Rather than going to the first post, would it be possible to have that icon take you to the end of the thread if you've already read it?

Would anyone else be interested in this functionality? (If I'm the only one, I'll defer to the masses).

That would be a welcome feature for me as well.

Would that be to get to the reply box faster, John?

Well....I'm not quite as fast now that there isn't an FAQ (plus, its still a bit early for the "What's the weather/crowds like?" posts), but I need to practice before that becomes an issue.

There's no way of knowing if you've seen the thread at all though, so that wouldn't make sense for someone coming to it for the first time. Well, there is, but it would involve some additional data molestation, and I'm not confident it would be efficient. As it is, I'm trying to decide what the threshold is for keeping it fast now given the current system. There are already 8,000+ records keeping track of what you've read and when, and I'm not sure how that will scale. Right now it looks OK (queries generally under 5 milliseconds), but you know... it's not like this site gets hammered.

Jeff said:
... it's not like this site gets hammered.

That is until that 500 foot rotating restuarant comes along. ;)

I think the forum functionality is at a good place. The load times are awesome for my questionalbe connection speed at school. Performance is more important to me than extra functions. The current state of the forum is far better than previous versions already.

Page renders are still taking under one-tenth of a second most of the time, and that makes me happy. At most they seem to top out at .3, and that's rare. Huge difference from the half-second or more it took sometimes with the old one.

Well, what I was suggesting (and this is based on how I see it work, not sure if this is right).

CURRENT CODE (I think....)
on_click()
{
if_unread(this_thread)
goto first_unread
else
goto first_post
}

MY SUGGESTION
on_click()
{
if_unread(this_thread)
goto first_unread
else
goto last_post
}

This is for when you are viewing a forum, and you click the blue (or gray) "page" icon on the left hand side of a particular thread.

I don't know if my pseudo-code above clarified anything, if not, feel free to just throw a drink at me on Opening Day.

That's not at all how it works, but good try. :)

Jugga,

Your guess looked good to me. :) Of course, if it really were that simple, I should get into the forum writing business.

From what I gather, it seems the code to determine whether to display the blue icon or the grey icon next to a post must be separate from the code to determine where you go when you click it. Otherwise, if ( grey_icon) go to last post makes sense.

On the other hand, I would gamble that most people reply to posts 95% of the time after they have just read newly added content, not to threads with no new content since last visit. Either way, I'm definitely a fan of not having the pagination counts shown for each thread, although that would make it easier to get around old (sometimes long) threads.

That last part, you're probably right. When you start trying to code for the rarest of use cases, that's when you get into feature bloat, and never ship anything.