Thread Preview by Rolling Over the Title? Can it be Implemented?

I have seen a nifty feature on other forums in which if you roll over the thread title, it gives you a thread preview with the first few sentences written within it. It is a great feature and it would really save myself (and others) from clicking on a thread and realizing it is very silly or poorly written.

I would love your input on this, and let me know if you know what I'm talking about when I say thread preview.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you,

-SolarE

I agree, that would be most useful.

I do this all the time on other sites and for news articles. Would be a great feature.

I like this idea.

It'd be so much easier if we could filter out the outright tabloid threads, 'specially the political ones. Luckily it only takes a couple lines for those threads to expose themselves.

This would be the way the go.

It really does make the thread browsing experience much much easier...

Mods... do you think something like this could be implemented without too much trouble?

I agree, that is an awesome idea.

Here is a fine example: forums.nasioc.com...

subaru ftmfw!

I think this would be another time saving feature that could be added.
If this was implemented, I'd be more willing to explore outside of the recent posts feature.
As it stands now, it takes a lot of investment of time to browse ATS's main threads.
So a feature like this would definately encourage a lot of us to wander off to find good threads in the other multiple forums here. Yeah, there is a lot of good stuff here but there is also a lot of junk.
Anything to avoid that is only a good thing IMO.

I have used that feature on another site and it's awesome!!!!

I think that it would be an important tool to use here and it should be implemented. I would believe that it would be easy to implement this feature onto the servers. I mean it would help us to get some idea about a thread that you see and try to remember it when you come back for a look at what it's about.

I really like the idea. At home I'm on dialup so it would help me avoid the sarcasm threads. I hate those.
However, most of the time I'm accessing ATS from my cell phone, and I have some dfficulties at times. Would this feature cause any additional problems with a mobile phone?

Sounds like a great idea.

Since the ATS TPTB decided to dump the old latest threads firehose, something like that would be a great substitute.

Yes... it's a nice feature, and a "default" setting on many out-of-the-box forum software packages.

However...

No out-of-the-box forum system can accommodate the level of traffic we get here... more than 900,000 pages viewed every day. Also, our custom software shows far more threads in the "recent posts" page than anything else out there. Adding a 2-2 sentence roll-over preview in forum indexes and recent posts would add a significant amount to the total file size of those pages, in addition to slowing-down the dynamic creation of those pages as it pulls the preview from the first post of every thread.

That can be fine on less-trafficked sites with 100 or so active threads a day, but not on a site like ATS with our massive traffic and high-frequency of new posts.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


That totally makes sense SO. Thank you for the reply. I truly do appreciate it.

Feel free to close the thread.

This was a feature I loved on my Apple. I don't know how it did it but anything I put the arrow or pointy thing over it showed a preview so I didn't have to fully click on it. I LOVED it...that would be a great feature on here!