Just lost another long post about the impact of a good and a bad design of the list of posts in a forum section.
Dont want to write it all again ...
Here is a good post list:
and here is a bad one.
A good post list prevents questions as they show related topics without the need to search or go into previous pages
A good post list shows frequently asked questions
A good post list gives forum junkies something interesting to answer on first sight
So obviously a well designed forum post-list should be as long as possible so that no drilling down into the menu is necessary.
When I joined VMTN we had about 50 posts listed for Workstation.
Last years we had a quite reasonable number of posts on page one.
The new design now replaces the single list with 2 slightly different lists and with the clever use of redundant entries breaks the record with just 4 posts per page.
Why does the current design list one thread 4 times ???? - that makes no sense at all
Why does the list of posts uses user-avatars that would make sense for a teenie-hairstyling forum instead of displaying status icons per post which would indicate sticky posts, posts with unread messages, unanswered posts, answered posts ... ?