How about reserving a redirect only as a emergency failsafe if Joss or Tim aor anyone else posting results in a flood?
If someone makes a post that causes a huge jump in hits, the post can be moved to a static page by a stompy. That stompy can also invoke the redirect protocol, or contact ita for same, and the site can redirect embedded links to the front page, or a special splash page with something like:
We're sorry, the massive traffic a recent posting has caused us to redirect embedded links from other sites. Click here to read the post or posts that caused the ruckus, or click here to continue on to the foamy Buffistas website.
Just an idea. Feel free to tweak or reject.
How, then, am I going to find the discussion around Joss mentioning the movie? Search? Threadsuck? Paging through until I find it? None of those ease things up.
I was envisioning it as a combination, I guess. People get redirected to the front page and there's a link to the Nilly thread. But who knows? Maybe it wouldn't make any difference.
If we redirected links to the frontpage, we would just need to have prominent wording about "If you are looking for posts from Joss or Tim (or other ME VIPs)
, they can eb found HERE (link to Nilly)". right?
Generally, when some outside place links to a VIP quote, they've already quoted the VIP. People who follow the link will want to read the posts around it for context. If we set up a special page with the VIP quote, most folks will still poke around trying to find the discussion from which it arose. That ends up using more resources, not less. Leaving things as they are may well be the most efficient way of dealing with this.
Except for the part where a newcomer may not know to go to Nillytown for a quick link.
And that only works if you're looking for a VIP post. If it was fic or funny or anything else that someone just e-mailed you, you'd be SOL.
Except for the part where a newcomer may not know to go to Nillytown for a quick link.
Was that a response to me? When I say "leave things as they are", I'm assuming that the outside place is already providing a direct link. I'm saying that redirecting to the front page can be bad for exactly your reason (among others), Jesse.
Yeah, that. I don't know what the heck I thought I was "responding" to. Heh.
My position: directing links to the front page only makes sense if we let people know where to find what they're looking for. So then, what's the point of doing it.
Also -- about the front page -- it also hits the database (to get the list of threads). It's not clear to me that that's any less resource intensive than grabbing ten posts from a specific thread (i.e. what linking directly to a post does).
I've got a question. When I hit a thread I see 50 posts, because that's how I have my preferences set (I am usually catching up). When someone who isn't registered checks a thread how many posts do they see? And does the number of posts per page have an effect on resources?
