Is this a well-known fact?

That you can link to a specific post, but rather than having a page that only shows that post, you can show the entire thread and just have the browser scroll to the anchor for that post?

Does this work for everybody, or would it depend on your user settings (e.g. how many posts per page you have showing)?

Here’s the difference:

Link to a post using the postcount query:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7780192&postcount=15

Link to a post using the post ID anchor:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=388257#post7780192

I think the second method is superior, because all the context is right there. Does this work for everybody? Does the second link take you right to my post in that thread?

The thing I can’t figure out is that the second link has only the thread ID (I think), and the post ID anchor, so I don’t know what would happen if the thread had multiple pages. I’ll have to experiment some more.

My apologies, I think this is all explained in a sticky. :blush: :smack:

Although maybe I should explain here what I found, in case any other dummies like me forget to look at the stickies:

The super easy way in vBulletin is just [ post ]7780192[ / post ] (without all those extraneous spaces, of course). That gives you one of these deals:
[post]7780192[/post]

Or even something like [ post=7780192 ]This is such an awesome post.[ / post ] like this:
[post=7780192]This is such an awesome post.[/post]

That seems to work great no matter what your # of posts per page setting is.

Personally, I wish people would do links to single posts this way, because it’s nice to have all the context right there. Anyway, thanks and good night.

Reported posts always come to us this way, so when we click on the link it takes us directly to the baaaad post.

I agree. It would also be nice if vB had an option to make the “#n” link do that instead of showing only that post.