Quote:
Originally Posted by oplichter
My idea would be to be complete and to make it easy for the users.
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I would agree. It does not make it just easier for the users, it also makes it easier to maintain:
You have a threshold when to put someone into the index. If that threshold were 0 then you simply put in all new arrivals. If it is not, then you've got to check each time a post is made: (i) is this now beyond the threshold, and (ii) if it is, is the thread already in the index.
At this point I was looking for an academic-hat-smilie - I actually teach algorithms at university.
The only way this saves work is if you do bugger all about maintaining the index that way, and wait instead for someone to shout that thread X is beyond the threshold. That works if sufficiently many people care sufficiently about the index to keep it up-to-date. If not then the index is buggered.
One downside of an incomplete index is: people will assume completeness of the index and create duplicate threads.