(Was going to start a new thread, but since this one’s right here…)
I have two issues here.
One, loading 3000 replies at once would indeed be a problem, but no thread in the (short) history of the BoingBoing BBS has as many as 500, and only 19 have more than 200. There’s got to be a happy medium between “load every single post in the entire thread” and “only load the posts that are visible on the current screen.” 100-200 posts are a time seems like it would work (although it might trip people up on longer threads, if they got used to searching normally and didn’t realize that it breaks on long threads).
Two, it’s not just that it only loads the current screen, it’s that it UNloads everything that’s not the current screen. I can understand wanting to reduce needless bandwidth, but right now, if I start at the beginning of the thread and page-down to the end, I can still only search the current screen or so. That means you’re making my browser throw out a bunch of data that it’s already received. If I page back up to the top of the thread, you’ve had to send me the entire thread twice for no good reason. Allowing posts, once loaded, to remain so would both save on bandwidth and let people Ctrl-F properly once they’d flipped through the entire thread once. That seems desirable.
