Date Filter for Displaying Topics

[klumy]

Make a date filter (with roll down menu)

so you can e.g display:
all topics
topics which are 1 day old
1 week old
1 month old...

have a look here, so you see what I mean
http://phpbb.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=6

[Zef Hemel]

Heard that suggestion lots of times, but don't see why it would be useful. Do you?

[RobDownSouth]

Hi Zef,
Maybe I can help shed some light on the date gate. I participated in a non-YaBB board that usually had hundreds of topics, and hundreds of users reading those topics. Time to initialize the site was atrocious, because the SQL engine had to read every single topic header, determine what page it was on, store it in an array or something, calculate the number of display pages, etc.

Then the site put a date gate on it, but it defaulted to 30 days of topics. No change. The date gate was changed to 3 days (people generally hit the site quite often) and the increase in initial load time was astounding, decreasing from 30-40 seconds to about 7-8 seconds.

This was configurable on a user-by-user basis.

Not sure of the mechanism YaBB SE uses to do the initial load, but anecdotally, the only "complaint" about the new system is the initial load of the main page (of course this could be due to a variety of things, such as CSS style sheets, etc).

[klumy]

why not useful?
sometimes you just need to see the topics of the last 2 days (e.g. you are in a financial forum (dow jones index..), where older thread are not important for you). So you need this function. otherwise you have to see the date of each topic.

[Jeff Lewis]

Now I'm not saying it's useful but Klumy, you sure keep posting a lot about phpBB...