OK I take it all back. I answered without thinking.

I'd delete my post, but that would be cheating.

The answer to Jessica's question is, less bandwidth gets used up if you have more posts to a page.

This is because the page consists of both posts and furniture, nav, forms, graphics and whatever.

So five lots of twenty is five lots of furniture and ten lots of ten is ten lots of furniture.

If you only downloaded the posts, it would all be equal.

less bandwidth gets used up if you have more posts to a page.

Excellent.

As my penance, I did the maths -- here's a randomly chosen full page of Natter (as in, not at the end yet, somewhere in the middle):

Total Posts Furniture 18.3 Kb 8.7 Kb 9.6 Kb

So that page, which has, let me see, ten posts, is about 47% content and 53% furniture.

If it had twenty posts, let's just make up a figure:

Total Posts Furniture 27 Kb 17.4 Kb 9.6 Kb

it would be 64% content. Someone check my calculations?

This is ignoring images, which is OK because they're few, and they're cached.

[edit because numbers are meaningless if you don't know what they're enumerating...]

Okay, this has got to be the coolest feature EVER!!!! Because, like, there doesn't seem to be a limit to the number of posts that can be displayed. It's like an automatic threadsucker!!!

Okay, taking a breath...

The bandwidth downside is that if you set the number of posts fairly high, and click onto a thread that you've already read to the end, you'll get the last however many posts you set instead of just the last ten. I don't see that as much of a problem though, and it is a great feature for folks trying to catch up.

Yup, I was just able to threadsuck Natter 1. Cool.

Don't do this at home, kids...

Posts per page! Excellent. Thank you guys!

And, as a side note, I fiercely love being able to italicise in my tagline (I don't really see why being able to make it *bold* is relevant, though, because tags are already bold, aren't they?); and I think quickedit could be an elegant solution as long as it were still possible to get around it some way-- if you wanted to have a tagline that started with a lowercase "i", like, you could put a space before that and it would work?

Thanks for the posts per page. I'm a happy girl.

Yup, we can now give more precise instructions for the John H. natter diet. Set the number of posts displayed in your profile to fifty (50), or any other convenient quantity, go to the natter thread, and then click 'Recent'. Voila! The last fifty posts in one convenient place.

Oooh, I don't think that's a good idea. Not everyone wants to download a page that size, or have all their threads read in 50-post chunks.

I'm still voting for the JHND to be added as a feature one day.

A box that says:

Skip to [NUMBER] from the end

or

I want to read the last [NUMBER] posts

or something.

You can always change it back to a more manageable number when you've caught up. I had mine set to 10100 to try the threadsuck, but I changed it right back. And fifty at a time on a cable modem seems pretty quick, especially compared to 5 x 10.

edit: That said, I like your idea, too. Should be doable, no?