Request: Show post text when mouse hovers on thread title.
 

Is there any way we can have the forum software display a preview of the thread when you hover the mouse over a title? To see what I mean hover your mouse over any thread on this board. I do not know how it is done or even if it is something feasible, but I think it would provide a great benefit. It should result in less bandwidth usage, as people would be able to discern what the thread is about without having to open the thread. Thoughts?

Hometheater Forum does this, and I love it. I would think that it would save tons of bandwith?

It would probably wind up requiring more bandwidth, since the first post of each thread on each page would have to be queried out, plus the additional overhead of the DHTML code used to render that text. Then people would complain about spoilers coming up, etc., etc., etc. I would not imagine that a significant number of people would use this feature to determine whether or not to read a thread.

It makes more sense to push for descriptive subject lines, which the mods currently handle very successfully. Querying out the first post would only give you an idea of what the thread will discuss, which the subject line should be doing anyway.

Actually it would not use that much more bandwidth, look at the source code on these forums, there is about 9 lines (at most 10K) of functions that would have to be loaded per page (showing all 25 topics) then on the title of each post, there is a mouseover calling the function, minimal extra data. It would have to hit the DB server on the mouseovers, but the should not affect bandwidth very much.

Say 100 people that use the mouseover, if 10 of them decide not to enter the thread because the topic doews not look good, I think it would save a bandwidth,


This might be very useful in the exchange forum where since people can get an idea of what people have for trade without clicking on the thread.




Do you know for sure that the spoiler tags no not work on these pop-ups?

I have been guilty of doing this on occasion and you are right, more descriptive subjects would save some clicks and bandwidth.

Wow, that's pretty sweet. :up:

They don't at the HTF. It shows up as: [.spoiler]the good guy won[/.spoiler] (without the periods, of course).

Not significantly more, I would agree, but I would guess that there would still probably be more. The only bandwidth savings would be if someone highlighted a topic and decided not to read the whole thread. I obviously can't say with authority either way, but I would think that the number of people who would be turned away from a thread by previewing the first few lines of the first post would not be that large. On the other hand, every time the lists of the topics were loaded -- a figure that's probably in the hundreds of thousands a day -- those previews would be loaded.

They definitely don't work on the HTF, as Scott mentioned.

That's pretty cool stuff. Man, would that save a lot of deceptive threads.

but that's half the fun ;)

seriously though, i think this is a great idea.

I think that's a great idea! :up:

Re: Request: Show post text when mouse hovers on thread title.
 

Not sure if it's the same thing but when hovering over a link I get a box with link info and post text and sometimes it's pretty big.

How does one turn that off?