I have found that many of the "useless" comments show up as good Google searches when I'm looking up errors. This kind of behavior has been incredibly useful in the past for figuring out what to do with a bug I've encountered. Unfortunately, lately it's been much harder for me to use this approach because after I use the link in Google the comments are gone. This behavior wouldn't be a "big" deal except that AppDB only shows the top comments in the Google cache (and Google will eventually remove these pages), so there's no way to look at the responses for deleted comments (note: if we changed AppDB to feed Google all of the comments that would be really nice).
Anyway, I would definitely appreciate a 25 threads/page system - the current "infinite comments" system is rather unweildly to navigate. Personally, I would prefer that rather than delete these comments that comments get marked as "outdated". If outdated comments weere pushed to the end of the list, and clearly marked that they are outdated, then they could still be useful for historical purposes without interfering with the usability of the site.
Erich Hoover ehoover@mines.edu
I personally think a Slashdot style system (like mentioned earlier) is perfect for this. If users rated posts up and down, and there is a customizable threshold above which the comments are visible. Then the most relevant and useful posts would always be the ones people could see, outdated/irrelevant posts would drop below the threshold and only the subject would be visible. You could even use simple AJAX to grab the comments that were below the threshold when they are requested, which would save on bandwidth/page load for pages with a large number of comments.
Luke.
Replacing the comments system in the appdb has been a long standing goal. The plan was to take an existing system and interface it into the appdb so we could leverage a project that was designed to manage threads/comments etc. I would be willing to provide consulting help to anyone interested in working on that task.
Chris