There are a number of forums here that I'm interested in, such as the ZBrush and Modo forums, but when I go to either all I see is a few posts going back only a month or so.

I've already figured out that if I click on the archive link I can set a date range to display, and I would hope that would keep it permanent, but when I click back to "top of forum" it again shows me only the few threads of the last month or so.

So then I figured out that I can set a bookmark for after I've gotten my selected date range and then the bookmark will always take me to where I can see all the threads, but again if I click on "top of forum" it reloads the aforementioned limited threads, so I have to reload my bookmark every time if I want to see earlier threads. For example, the ZBrush forum by default shows me threads going back only to August 28 2010, which  is only 43 days ago.

I'm not seeing any kind of option anywhere to make a forum permanently display all threads - is there something that I'm simply missing? I'd find it hard to believe that the forum default is to only show threads no older than about 6 weeks.

Thanks for any help. :-)

Edit:
Hmmm... it seems that all threads are like that, going back only about 6 weeks, just that the forums with few posts make it seem emptier.
There must be a global option for displaying a date range for all forums that I'm just missing.

Quote - I'm not seeing any kind of option anywhere to make a forum permanently display all threads - is there something that I'm simply missing? I'd find it hard to believe that the forum default is to only show threads no older than about 6 weeks.

You're not missing anything, the forums here are set up to move all posts except announcements (yes, that does include supposedly "Sticky" threads) into the archives after 45 days.

Quote - > Quote - I'm not seeing any kind of option anywhere to make a forum permanently display all threads - is there something that I'm simply missing? I'd find it hard to believe that the forum default is to only show threads no older than about 6 weeks.

You're not missing anything, the forums here are set up to move all posts except announcements (yes, that does include supposedly "Sticky" threads) into the archives after 45 days.

Thank you for the reply. I was starting to figure that after searching for a way and not finding one.
Well, that kinda sucks...

*"I'm not seeing any kind of option anywhere to make a forum permanently display all threads - is there something that I'm simply missing? I'd find it hard to believe that the forum default is to only show threads no older than about 6 weeks."

*They do that to speed up the site...Loading every post,in every forum by default would bring the site  to a crawl.

8 )

Tom

Quote - *"I'm not seeing any kind of option anywhere to make a forum permanently display all threads - is there something that I'm simply missing? I'd find it hard to believe that the forum default is to only show threads no older than about 6 weeks."

*They do that to speed up the site...Loading every post,in every forum by default would bring the site  to a crawl.

8 )

Tom

Okay cool, I guess that makes sense although I don't know anything about site programming and all that.
Would it be possible for them to code it in a way that allowed individual forums to be set to show all posts, or at least all posts within the past year or something like that?
Assuming it were possible to do that, they could also disable the feature in high traffic forums.

I mean, it seems kinda silly to have a forum where a newbie would open and see no posts, zero, nada, zip, nothing to offer, and think it's just dead. And there are several here like that.

Better yet, would it be worth offering as a suggestion, or is that a dead end street?

It may be worth noting that other forums with (as far as I can tell) similar amounts of traffic don't fall over and die just because all of their historical posts are immediately available. The thread archive has been a feature of Renderosity since before the forum software was updated. It may be nothing more than a legacy hold-over which hasn't been reviewed to see if it can be safely removed.

Quote - It may be worth noting that other forums with (as far as I can tell) similar amounts of traffic don't fall over and die just because all of their historical posts are immediately available. The thread archive has been a feature of Renderosity since before the forum software was updated. It may be nothing more than a legacy hold-over which hasn't been reviewed to see if it can be safely removed.

Well I certainly hope they don't remove it, since it's the only way to find posts older than 6 weeks.
Unless you mean removing the date range selection feature, and just make it so the "archive" link shows the entire history. That would be alot better than having to select dates from the pull down thingies.

Quote - They do that to speed up the site...Loading every post,in every forum by default would bring the site  to a crawl.

No forum software I know suffers from that problem, the concept of paging works wonders.
It's more likely there's some other limitation of the software that requires this to be done or just simply that that's how they built it.

Quote - No forum software I know suffers from that problem, the concept of paging works wonders.
It's more likely there's some other limitation of the software that requires this to be done or just simply that that's how they built it.

Yeah, I was gonna say that I frequent forums that have far far more forums and threads than here and never have any slowness issues.
Of course, those are mostly v-bulletin forums, and I'd suspect they're set up to optimize the situation.