Often times while reading a thread I want to post a link to a previous thread - perhaps the subject was recently discussed, or I remember something someone said from another thread and want to post a link to that thread. All I need to do in that case is look up the thread title so I can get the thread ID, then paste the link.
Other times, before posting a new thread, I use search to see if a topic has been discussed.
In both these cases I don’t need to open / read the thread, just see whether my topic has been discussed in the last three months.
My suggestion:
How about a link to a page that is just a large list of rows of text with nothing but the thread ID, title, and OP? There wouldn’t need to be any Hlink code behind it, just a static page of text showing ID, Title and OP by row, updated every so often with new threads. The servers wouldn’t need to be taxed at all, other than to load a static page full of text - no graphics, no Hlinks.
You could CTRL+F (or CMD+F or what have you) the page for the text you wanted, get the thread ID, then post your reply and paste in the standard {url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=<number from text file>”} w/o ever having to tax the servers by loading the specific thread.
If you wanted to actually read the thread from that static page, it would be a simple matter of pasting http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=<number> into the Address field of the browser.
Of course I realize the list of total threads is ~223,000, but older threads could easily be excluded, and / or each Forum could have its own text file of thread titles.
And no, this wouldn’t work for searching for a specific post or any of the other more intrusive Search functions, but maybe it could ease some of the Search traffic for SDMBers using it like I do.
I’m not all that familiar with PHP, but I am a Dev, and I can’t imagine parsing this info from PHP into a static Text page delimited into three columns and pasted in rows would be difficult.
Thoughts?