I've noticed a that very lively discussions often slow to a crawl when posters percieve that a page break is about to happen. When one's post ends up as the last one on the page it is literally possible that only 1 other person (the first responder) will actually read it.

I suppose all the BB software packages have fixed length pages so perhaps there is nothing that can be done.

But if an FT member could dynamically specify the number of posts to include per displayed page (a feature many shopping websites have) that would end this frustrating phenomenon.

You can, anywhere from 5 to 40 posts per page in a thread, whatever your preference (see your Options in My Flyertalk). 40 Posts max per page hasn't stopped the "waste of time" threads on OMNI or any other highly lively topics.

Although I wonder if you mean the number of *threads* displayed per page in a particular forum, as opposed to the number of posts per page in a particular thread.

Thanks for the assistance with this omahajim.

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.