A suggestion to whomever pays the bills here..

First let me preface by saying that i'm a web developer. I work in ASP, and i understand that php (which vBulliten is obviously written in) is similar.

Second, let me say that a friend of mine runs a vBulletin site. He doesn't have a sponsored membership the way this site does, but he runs his ads, and asks people to click on them to help support the site. But costs are high for him. With the amount of traffic he gets, performance can be a real problem sometimes. With that in mind I'll get to my point..

When you're on any of the forums, you have a title for each of the threads there -- or most of them. Each of those titles varies in size, but i'm sure there's a maximum. But the bottom line is that a whole lot of data is being sent down, just for the mouse-over to show the first couple of sentences of each thread. I did a little self-test on it, and the source of the forum that i checked was 97K. When i cut out all those titles, along with some of the extraneous "'s and empty tags, the inline CSS which could be put in a reference file.. it reduced it 17K to 80K. It's about an 18% reduction in size of that download.

Even limiting the number of threads per page would help keep down traffic some, and keep costs down.

Anyway, it's none of my business I'm not a contributing member yet, but when i saw the mouseover bring up the title, i realized that a ton of extra and mostly unused data was being traffic'd around, and the computer nerd/programmer in me had to bring it up

Take care

I have to say that it is one of my favourite features of the new boards

I'm not so sure that removing it would cut down on bandwidth, though, and here's why: I find myself clicking on *fewer* threads, because I am easily able to see whether I'm interested in it without opening it and thus loading a whole new page. It would be interesting to find out whether the overall effect of people doing that was a greater saving than the extra bandwidth in having the feature in the first place.

I also am a fan of the mouseovers. They are a great way to home in on a thread subject when the subject line is vague or can be interpreted more than one way.

For me, I'm not sure it cuts down bandwidth-usage because now I'll check the mouseover and open many threads that I previously might have ignored because it wasn't worth the trouble to open all the vague-subject threads to see which ones interested me. So the new mouseover feature has increased the amount of data I call for from EN World and also greatly enhanced my enjoyment of these boards.

-Dave

Keep the mouseovers. I really like them.