Waste of Memory/Space

[Ketjak]

Folks,

Reprinting the entirety of a message board post in the news, no matter how good the post is, is a waste of memory. Some folks use mobile devices to read the site and it is at least inconvenient to download an irrelevant-to-them post - and sometimes it's worse than that (the page is too big to load or they pay per K of bandwidth). Better to link to those posts with a teaser, like limiting the "Best of" list from Shade to the opening para only.

The News page also seems to dump content based on the total length of the content, rather than age. If you repost an entire message, it kills older material. That's important to me since time is at a premium and I read once a week (and sometimes on a mobile device - Treo or PSP), but I can't be alone.

Can I?

Thanks, folks.

- Ketjak

 

[Umbran]

That's important to me since time is at a premium and I read once a week (and sometimes on a mobile device - Treo or PSP), but I can't be alone.

Can I?

Not that I'm the one such requests go to, but I don't recall seeing a whole lot of requests for features geared towards mobile devices around here.

The fact of the matter is, the needs of mobile users vs the needs of more conventional users are at odds with each other, and may well remain so until mobile technology improves. A single site designed for one will not meet the needs of the other. To properly support mobile devices, we'd want a separate design for them.

 

[Ketjak]

Not that I'm the one such requests go to, but I don't recall seeing a whole lot of requests for features geared towards mobile devices around here.

The fact of the matter is, the needs of mobile users vs the needs of more conventional users are at odds with each other, and may well remain so until mobile technology improves. A single site designed for one will not meet the needs of the other. To properly support mobile devices, we'd want a separate design for them.

Well, there was an "and" in there - there are two problems with quoting an entire post:

1. It forces other content to drop off faster, if indeed the amount of content is causing the older content to drop off and not time (sometimes there's five days on the main news site, other times there are two, and generally consecutive days).

2. Mobile users are inconvenienced.

Although I'm sometimes a mobile user, I really don't care too much about accessing via those devices; I'm used to formats being wrecked by limited browsers. It's ancillary information lending weight to the argument, but can be disregarded without hurting the core: that entire posts shouldn't be quoted on the news page.

That's the issue that I'm raising. Is there a good reason for it? (It happens to be that it will address the mobile users' problems, but I'm not concerned with that).

(For what it's worth, you don't have to redesign the site for mobile use - it generally displays fine, unless there's so much text or so many images that it exceeds the device's ability to display the site).