# Making the links in the dictionary 'hoverable'?



## Philippa

Hello Mike!
Is it possible (technically and server speed wise) to make the forum links that you get when you look up a word in the dictionary like the thread titles in the forums, so that when I hover my cursor over it I can see the box with the text of the first post? (I hope this makes sense). I ask this out of sheer laziness  because when I look up a word and it's not in the dictionary or the meaning I'm after isn't in the dictionary, then there is often a long list of threads to explore and you can't often tell from the title how relevant it'll be, so I often end up doing lots of clicking backwards and forwards until I find one that's useful. (I really hope this makes some sense - I've just written 2 horribly long sentences trying to explain it!)
Abrazos
Philippa


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## roxcyn

Hey Philippa, yea they already do that, actually.  If you have the cursor by the subject you should see a small box pop up and you get the text of the first post.  I hope that helps you


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## panjandrum

roxcyn said:


> Hey Philippa, yea they already do that, actually. If you have the cursor by the subject you should see a small box pop up and you get the text of the first post. I hope that helps you


Are you sure? - they don't do that for me  
I know this happens on the main forum list, but not in the list of threads at the bottom of the dictionary entries.


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## Jana337

panjandrum said:


> Are you sure? - they don't do that for me


They don't in Firefox either.

Jana


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## cuchuflete

I've tried with Safari, IE, and FF, and mouseover does nothing on the dictionary links to threads.


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## badgrammar

Same here, it would be nice, though...


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## roxcyn

panjandrum said:


> Are you sure? - they don't do that for me
> I know this happens on the main forum list, but not in the list of threads at the bottom of the dictionary entries.



Oh, I am sorry!  I thought he was speaking of the forum, yes you are right, not in the dictionary.  That would be a wonderful feature too!


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## Hockey13

This would be a great feature since that would be very useful, time-saving information...might even save bandwidth, though I'm not sure how.


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## elroy

Hockey13 said:


> might even save bandwidth, though I'm not sure how.


 Well, presumably you'd be clicking on fewer links, thereby loading fewer pages and decreasing the total amount of bandwidth you're using up.


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## Nick

elroy said:


> Well, presumably you'd be clicking on fewer links, thereby loading fewer pages and decreasing the total amount of bandwidth you're using up.


Though no doubt this will increase server load, as the server must query the forum database for the text of the posts, not just the titles. Depending on the number of posts that match the definition and on the database setup, the increase could be almost nothing, though.


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## elroy

Nick said:


> Though no doubt this will increase server load, as the server must query the forum database for the text of the posts, not just the titles.


 I don't think so.  The links will still only be for _threads_ whose titles have the word in question.  The only difference will be that you can hover over the link to see the first few lines of the first post.

(We should be using "would" instead of "will" because we don't know if this will happen! )


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## Nick

elroy said:


> I don't think so.  The links will still only be for _threads_ whose titles have the word in question.  The only difference will be that you can hover over the link to see the first few lines of the first post.
> 
> (We should be using "would" instead of "will" because we don't know if this will happen! )


Sorry, maybe I should have said "Though no doubt _[that doing]_ this will increase server load ...". However, I am positive that this change will increase server load (maybe only by a trivial amount, but it must still increase). The uncertainty is whether the change will actually be implemented, not whether it will generate increased load.

By "server load", I mean processing power on the server. Since the server needs to look up more information to generate the page (the server needs to get the title of the thread with the word _and_ then also the text of the first post in the matching thread... as opposed to right now where it just needs to get the title of the thread with the word), a little more time and processing power will be spent generating the page.

Although I am not familiar with vBulletin specifically, the forum systems I have used on my websites have stored the titles of the threads and the actual text of the posts in different locations (usually the titles are stored in one table, the posts are stored in another, and an id number is used to "link" the pieces and tell the forum which posts belong in which thread).


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## elroy

You have gone beyond the limits of my computer expertise  but I think I get what you're saying.  Thanks for the explanation.


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