Front page pagination

[Induktio]

When the front page is so long as it is now, it's an usability issue when the browser hangs for a long time loading all that content which is probably not what the user intended to read in full anyway. There's *hundreds* of image files alone.

There should be some of kind pagination so only a fixed number of newest items are displayed per page. Could save a lot of loading time.

[bvanevery]

Hm, I believe in the possibility of the issue you describe, but I have not observed it.  I had a valid test case today.  I finished an AAR recently, and BUncle did the good thing of putting it up on the home page.  Thanks!

I didn't have any problem with loading up speed.  Speedtest.net is showing that I'm on a 16 Mbps tier of service right now.  That's ok by USA home service standards, not great not bad, plenty functional.  I haven't tried it over free public wifi yet, where I might expect things to be slower.  What sort of speed of service are you using, Induktio?

I did notice that the 1st page of my AAR did seem to appear in full, and I was surprised at that.  It was not my intention to knock posts below it off the page, especially since those are my AARs being knocked off.     If I should have created my 1st post with an eye towards its length on the home page, I'll take that into consideration next time.  I suppose I could Frankenstein my 1st and 2nd posts in that thread, to make the 1st one shorter, but I don't remember needing to do that previously.  I will check over my AAR history to see what the format differences are.

In other diagnostic news, I am running Firefox Quantum, 63.0.1, 64-bit version, on Windows 10, on a 10 year old business class laptop.  Just in case you are experiencing a browser, system, or driver issue.  I do not have a lickety split machine, although it gets the job done, and it can definitely handle SMAC.

[bvanevery]

I reviewed my most recent AARs, the ones with "slick, full scale" production values, that got posted to the home page of this site.  It seems, I've always had multiple image 1st posts, and those multiple images have always (?) been displayed on the home page.  At least, they are all displayed now.

Difference is, I typically had 2 images in a leading post.  Typically the Faction mugshot, and my starting position on Planet.  This time I did 5 images in my lead.  1 Faction mugshot as usual, and 4 screenshots pertaining to the game's rules about chemical weapons.  I don't think this was wrong to do.  It's core information about the premise of the AAR, that even experienced players can't be expected to just know.  Let alone a noob audience that I'm trying to jazz up about this game.

I am guessing that the webpage displays with some "cutoff algorithm".  Like "after the last screenshot, continue with some text and then display a [MORE] link."  This algorithm seems fine when there's only 2 images involved.  For 5 images, well, that's not really truncating much.  The structure of that post is Image, short Paragraph, repeated 5 times.  If I were going to insert a [MORE] link manually, I'd put it after {I P I P}.

Actually, looking at it again, I think my most recent AAR has the same amount of text as all my other AARs.  The algorithm probably cuts off at some word count.  I'm just efficient with my words, and I have 3 extra images in this post, which are not being counted as part of a length total.  So if I do anything differently in the future, I'll just remember that "images are not counted as part of the total length" and plan accordingly.  Assuming no other changes to the status quo are made.

[Induktio]

This has nothing to do with any AAR content or even what kind of content should be on the front page. Simply by just looking at the numbers, the front page generates over 600 requests to dozens of domains and transfers over 110 MB data, although most of that might be cached. That's way excessive.

[bvanevery]

I'll believe you sir.  I just haven't personally experienced the pain.  The only time I go to the home page, is if I've written an AAR and a few days later I think, "did I make the home page?"  I always jump straight to the forums, with cached links in my browser.  That's my process.

Also, historic accident of when I typically write an AAR, I've usually got broadband access to go with it.  So home page loads up, no problemo.  I spend a lot of my existence on public wifi, sometimes with good bandwidth, but quite often paltry.  Hadn't noticed a problem, but I'm probably looking at the home page very seldom in practice.

I'm wondering if the current browser protocols are to load the first stuff, which is typically what I see on my screen?  Then all the other stuff might be loaded as a background process, just ongoing.  If you're not actually scrolling down to see more stuff, you'd never notice any lag.  Such a protocol can waste a lot of metered bandwidth, and that's a problem for someone, if they're getting charged money for all this lazy on demand piping.  But if I'm correct, the performance is probably just fine for a lot of people's in-practice usage.

Are you using any kind of an "odd" browser?  I'd consider MS Edge, Firefox, and Chrome to be "not odd".