Request to please consider - Mouse over preview of topic.

[StormWolf01]

Hello to Robin, Dante, LH, members of staff, and my fellow community members.

First, thanks for taking a moment to ready my thread. As always, I appreciate it.

 

There's been some talk about the enormous amounts of bandwidth, that the site uses, now that we have grown to the epic proportions that we have.

And while I know that just one person clicking on a link to open a forum link doesn't use very much bandwidth, that when hundreds, or thousands of us are all doing it, it becomes quite a torrent of requests to the host servers.

 

On some other forums that I habit, they have the pages set up to where if you hover your mouse over a topic, you can see a preview of the first few lines of said topic. This, serves two (possibly more, I dunno) purposes. It cuts down on the amount of bandwidth and request information that the servers have to yield, as well as an added convenience of giving the user some idea of whether or not they want to open that page, to view it. (Which can also conserve bandwidth and load on the servers.)

 

While I don't know the technicalities of how that function works, my logic (in my ignorance of the technicalities) thinks that a smaller request for information, is better than the full request for the information. Which, is why I think that it might be beneficial for everyone.

 

But most especially as an idea to try to cut costs.

 

Thanks for your time reading, best wishes to all, and especial thanks to Robin and Crew for everything that you all do for us. I know that a lot of people really don't understand what all that entails.

[Pasquale1223]

Nice idea, though it probably wouldn't serve the goal of reducing data transfer.

 

It would likely have the opposite effect, since that preview text would also be downloaded along with the thread titles - whether visitors ever mouse over it or not.

[StormWolf01]

Pasquale Thanks for the reply!

It actually depends on how the code is implemented, I think. On some sites, like HKpros (A gun forum) you can actually see a status bar, when you hover over a topic, and the preview takes a bit to load. Or you are on a super slow connection, or using a slow browser. I'm really not trying to say that I disagree with you, and with me not knowing the technicalities, I most definitely am not saying that you're wrong. Only saying that the site I'm using for reference only DL's the preview on the actual mouse-over.

[Pasquale1223]

They may have javascript embedded that retrieves the preview / summary text only on mouseover.

 

Doing it that way requires a download of the javascript itself along with some additional embedded coding for each title so the script would know exactly what to retrieve. Then each retrieval attempt (mouseover) would hit the database to retrieve the requested information and download it to the client.

 

It can be a nice feature, and the Nexus designers might want to consider it... though I don't know that it would save any bandwidth. Sometimes thread titles don't really tell you what a thread is about, but I think most users choose whether to click on a thread based on its title. Shrug.

[StormWolf01]

They may have javascript embedded that retrieves the preview / summary text only on mouseover.

 

Doing it that way requires a download of the javascript itself along with some additional embedded coding for each title so the script would know exactly what to retrieve. Then each retrieval attempt (mouseover) would hit the database to retrieve the requested information and download it to the client.

 

It can be a nice feature, and the Nexus designers might want to consider it... though I don't know that it would save any bandwidth. Sometimes thread titles don't really tell you what a thread is about, but I think most users choose whether to click on a thread based on its title. Shrug.

Hmmm. Ok, I see. Most informative. Thanks for taking the time to explain that :)

That could actually explain why sometimes it doesn't work when I'm on a browser that has scripts turned off :D

True enough, I guess it all just depends on our own individual surfing habits.

Cheers!