Reply To: The Random Post Thread (Game Potential)

[Bry]

Nobody who knows me, even vaguely, could doubt that I’m tremendously gratified that Colleen picked up on my oblique reference to a message hidden almost two months prior. (It’s not much of a puzzle — those of you who know the answer hopefully didn’t have to look very hard — and it’s not a particularly rewarding solution. But let me know privately if it’s really bugging you for some reason. Oh, for extra bonus points, try that search again.)

@Jon: This should be an entry in the FAQ, and perhaps it will be soon. But there are a couple ways to link to a particular post in the thread. The link from the search function works, as described in previous pages. Another way, with cleaner results, is to do the following, and I swear we’ve discussed it somewhere — oh, here it is, in the posts following a question from, well, you.

This is the URL to the current page as I see it now:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=497&page=34#Item_2

The individual pieces of this do exactly what they say:

• DiscussionID=497 means that this is thread #497,
• page=34 means that this is the 34th page of this thread,
• Item_2 means that I was linked to the 2nd entry on this page, which is Colleen’s post immediately above.

So by changing the values, you can jump to a different thread, a different page, or a different post on the page.

One possible way to find the post is just to try different numbers: if I want to link to the first time Jon asked this question, I’d first find the thread and page:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=583&page=1

then scroll down to the post, which is past midway down the page, and estimate it’s about the 40th post on the page. Entering
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=583&page=1#Item_40
takes me lower than I want,
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=583&page=1#Item_30
takes me a little higher, and from there I can count down three posts and figure out it’s the 33rd post on the page.

Alternatively, and more robustly, I can look at the HTML for the page. If I View Source and look at the HTML, I can find Jon’s comment. Right above where his comment starts, I see this (those of you playing at home should follow along in your web browsers) :

...

The “a name=”Item_33″” bit is an anchor tag (HTMLers know I’m cutting corners with this description), and it tells me that I want my link to point somewhere that ends in “#Item_33”.

(As mtgordon suggests in that thread, Firefox users can select the text, right-click, and choose “View Selection Source” to find that anchor tag without scrolling.)