Preferred method for navigating this board?

I almost double-posted because I did something really dumb.

The way I usually move around in here goes as follows:

1. Go to the Front Page to read the latest column or Staff Report, or check out Threadspotting, etc.

2. Click the “Message Board” link at the top of the page.

3. Absorb a boatload of knowledge. I do this by entering fora, reading threads, and hitting the “Back” button on my browser when I’m done.

This works great for lurking, but if I post I add:

4. Use the “quick reply” box, or hit the “reply” or “quote” buttons.

5. Click “Preview,” then “Submit.”

That’s where I run into problems. Once the full thread comes up with my (generally useless) post in it, I tend to click the Forum link at the top to go back to the same forum.

This works fine, but my brain doesn’t. I have to remember that I posted and that I need to click the forum list link to get back to “home base.”

Today I screwed up. I enterd a forum, browsed a few threads, posted a reply in one, browsed a few more, and started hitting the “Back” button.

Then I had the classic “oh sh*t” feeling when I saw the “Thank You for Posting” screen, and I clicked that “stop” button for all I was worth. The post didn’t go through a second time, but it could have.

So, I guess my questions are:

A) Is there a preferred (i.e. foolproof, remember who you’re dealing with here) method for navigating this board?

A.1) Like, should I make better use of the “forum jump” pulldown menu? That’s all I could think of.

B) Did I miss something really basic and I’m a complete moron?

C) Should I just shut off the computer and go to bed?

[sub]I am actually serious about this. If there is a way I could preserve available server time and/or avoid causing unnecessay work for the Mods and Admins I’d really like to know.[/sub]

If it’s B) I’m there with you, Exgineer, cause I always hit the back button after I post and I don’t have a double post yet. Of course I’m going test that right now…

I used to navigate the board like you do. I had to mess up once or twice before I realized never to pick Back after posting. I think that with the new safeties in place, though, it’s not a problem. Did you actually double-post like this?

I navigate differently now, and if you have a browser that facilitates it, I suggest you do it this way too. Instead of clicking on a thread and going back to the forum page, open threads in a new window. Then when you finish reading the thread, close the window. You can’t pick back on the new windows, so you’ll quickly drop that habit. Also, if you get good at it, you can open a couple of threads at once.

What I tend to do is visit each forum and right-click any threads I’m interested in and open them in new windows, I then sit back and browse through the two or three dozen windows and reply where appropriate; while the reply is going through, I read another thread.

Okay, thanks guys.

After re-reading the OP I think I should have chosen option “C.”

All I do is go to the MB’s home page, click “New Posts”, then navigate through the threads with new posts in them. When the list comes up, I’ll click on a thread that looks interesting and post to it if I so desire. Then I click my trusty back button till I get to “Search Results”, and the fun begins anew.

The back button moves you back in your browser history. It just showed you again your local copy of the page in your browser cache and didn’t even contact the Straight Dope server. Even if you press the reload button and ask the server to send you the ThankYou-(or any other)-page again, it wouldn’t create another post.

All the Thank-You-page does is - thank you. And it conveniently redirects your browser to request the updated thread page containing the new post. Posts are only submitted when you somewhere press a ‘submit reply’ button.

Avoid having the server send you pages again that you could easily reach through the history or keep open in another window. There’s no danger in using back and forward to cycle over and beyond Thank-You- or preview- pages. Just don’t go down and press submit again.

Although there is a certain logic to your statements, femtosecond, I have double-posted like this. I think it was before the last upgrade, though, so it may no longer be an issue.

Exgineer - I don’t think you can create a double-post by using the back button. I use the back button to return to the forum list unless I want to see the forum list refreshed or unless I add a post, in which case I click on the link back to the forum main page. But my main reason for doing that is simply to avoid the “Thank you for posting” window.

Naturally both the back button issue and double posts will only occur if and when you make a post. Are you sure you had enough double posts to tell coincidence from causality? How many double posts did you have when you not went back, and if you went back and there was no double post, did you notice that?

Option D) Get Mozilla and use tabs - same idea as new windows, at least within each tab, but doesn’t actually open up new browser windows. All in one place, nice and organized. I automatically close all “new windows” because they now only appear for pop-ups - I don’t even look at them.

Christonthecross, if we have a bunch of people doing that, no wonder there’s not enough connections for everyone!

Each new window is another connection.

I think you just explained to me how we could have over 500 users on the site for hours on end . . . and a lot of posts but not THAT volume of posts as might be expected.

Please be a little more considerate of your fellow Dopers, all of you. Might take you a little longer to get through the board but more of you can get on at one time.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

TubaDiva, what you’re saying makes a certain amount of sense, and I want to play nice, but is it really the case that 25 connections running for one minute is worse than one connection running for 40 minutes?

I use the “new window” method as well, and so far as I can tell, it’s no difference in the total server load. If there are fifteen threads in GQ that I want to read, that’s going to be 15 page requests, no matter how I request them. It doesn’t cost the server anything for the thread to be sitting open on my desktop for a while (it might cost my computer some memory, but that’s my problem). It does mean that my page requests will be clustered together more, but with the number of users we have, that should all average out.

Can any HTTP nerd offer any further insight?

Well, now there are at least three in that bunch. :o But that’s absolutely nothing to worry about, even if everybody would do it, there wouldn’t be an increase in the load on the server.

Perhaps even on the contrary, here for my european timezone it does actually relieve the server to preload pages which would be loaded anyway at a later time when the server gets busy. Then only stay updated with the most interesting ones. In other timezones it still wouldn’t increase the load to cluster your pageloads, but there preload more or less prohibits itself because you can benefit from waiting for the server to get a bit faster. Still the load difference comes from avoiding times with high traffic, not from multiple windows.

There aren’t really any ‘users on the site’ to count, it works on a by-request basis. The vBulletin software keeps track of the number of recent sessions, but that’s not correlated to traffic. I think every different IP address from cookie-less lurkers gets assigned its own sessionID. Then there’s still the issue with the rampaging search engine crawlers. How did you get the 500 users number?

When you open a thread page (both either in the current window or into a new window to read it later), your browser sends the server a request, it composes the desired thread page, then it sends this data back to you. There are no connections kept open for a window. Each number of requested pages means a certain, more or less constant amount of work for the hamsters. The rest is statistics.

100 people requesting 1 page per person per minute, for 10 minutes, or
100 people requesting 10 pages each in one minute, spread over 10 minutes,
both amounts to each person reading 10 pages in 10 minutes, and a load of 100 requested pages per minute on the server.

Of course if all people would request all their pages in the same minute, the server couldn’t send a page to most of them. But the Dope is well beyond the size where this would matter, because the more people there are, the more unlikely it gets for the times of their requests to coincide.

However, Chronos, if you open all 15 threads at once, and then read them one at a time, you will eventually read more threads in the same time period than if you opened one thread, read it, then went back to the forum main page, opened another thread, read it, etc… If you open one thread at a time, you will end up reading less amount of threads, and therefore putting less load on the server, assuming your time devoted per day to the SDMB remains constant, since more of your time will be spent waiting for a thread to open.

This is true, but if this is the only way it reduces server load, it strikes me as an artificial delay. One could say the same for the practice of, after reading every thread, closing your browser, reopening it, and returning to the forum page. It limits the load on the server, but only by cutting back on the number of threads you read.

Achernar, I didn’t say it was a good way to cut down server load. But the habit of opening several windows at once will probably end up putting more load on the server.

We need to define “load on the server”. The best way to reduce the load on the server would be to shut it off. But this is a message board, and you want people to use it. It is a ‘good’ load, you want to maximize the volume of requested pages, not try to reduce it. It’s the distribution of capacity we need to optimize.

The capacity of the server working off the page requests is limited and given, the optimum would be a non-fluctuating load just matching the capacity. But the load is fluctuating, there’s still a lot of free capacity in the night.

Using multiple requests in itself wouldn’t change the load distribution, there have to be other factors. True, it does condense your waiting times into one, leaving free time that might be used to request more pages, but that’s not the factor of the server load we try to optimize.

It gives you more flexibility in avoiding requests at high traffic times. Even if it really creates more page requests, it has a greater potential to balance the load than to increase it.

Use it right. Don’t request more pages than you can read before they get old. If the server is faster for you at a later time, then wait. Don’t have too many requests running at once, use even fewer when the server is busy. Still try to stagger them. If you use it, just try and use it to move your requests out of the busy-time.

The server has a setting for the maximum number of connections it can handle at once. The more connections it has to handle, the higher the load on the server. Even though you are not doing anything with a connection at the moment, it still exists. If you are not doing anything with three connections at the moment, three connections still exist.

One person downloading a 1 megabyte file is a lot easier on a server than a thousand people downloading a 1k file in the same time span.

Ergh, just reread this post and I wish I could explain it better. Sorry.

Here is a tiny bit more information on TCP being a stateful protocol, and the difference between UDP and TCP in terms of connections.

Network Layers

Pay attention to Layer 4.