Thanks for your answer. I imagine the vast majority of people are just using the forum default settings. What I was thinking of but didn't explain well is the facility that some shopping sites have at the bottom of the page. These often let you specify the number of items per page on the fly and there is usually an option to "display all" so you can just scroll through without regard to any page boundaries."Lively" was a poor choice of words on my part; I was really thinking more of "heated" as in serious and substantive. The livliest discussions seem to be the ones about nothing at all, as you noted, but those are not my interest. I've seen both factors at work. The difference is that some posters will add to an existing thread to move it back on to page one while the last post on a page is often stranded.