Thread title hover popups

jrawle

With the previous version of the forum, if you hovered the house over a thread title, it showed a pop-up preview of the text of the post. It made it easy to see whether a post was of interest without having to visit its page. If there a similar feature of the new forum that can be enabled somewhere? Sorry if it's been asked before; I did search and couldn't find anything.

Frogletina

It's not a feature of this new version, unfortunately.

jrawle

Frogletina said:

It's not a feature of this new version, unfortunately.

"Progress"!

jamesd

jrawle said:

Frogletina said:

It's not a feature of this new version, unfortunately.

"Progress"!

Maybe yes. getting that text took work and the site was already suffering load issues. Not doing it when relatively few people used most of the results of the work might be beneficial if inconvenient for users like me who used it routinely. Feature/performance trade-offs can be tricky and uncomfortable.

jrawle

A setting somewhere that had to be actively enabled for the minority who wanted to use it could have solved the load issues.

Of course, I tend to forget that many people these days don't even know how to use a mouse...

jamesd

One potential way might be to show it only to people who are logged in.

There can still be a reason not to do it, though, since many types of content can be cached server-side in partially produced pages and if you allow customisation that restricts which versions or how far from complete the cached page can be. That in turn can increase the page rendering workload at the server end of things. Page rendering being assembling all of the various bits of a page and customising them as needed for the specific viewer.

A place like Wikipedia has some fairly sophisticated partial page caching and does allow extensive per-user personalisation so it can be done, provided load and other considerations make it sensible.