option to use, Number of Posts to Show Per Page:

[Castellon]

I have not been to that site, but I would guess if they have that feature turned on then they have significantly less traffic than this site by an order a magnitude.
We have stretched this program as far as it can go, which is one of the reasons we are writing our own shell to contain it. It is possible that once HAL comes on line we can look at the feasibility of allowing bigger pages.

 

[Castellon]

That option is available on the Straight Dope Message Board, which uses vB 3.7.3 vs our 4.1.5. While maybe not quite at our level, they are not small:

Does letting people see 200 posts to a page instead of 50 put that much of an extra load on the server?

That is only about 1 quarter the members of our forum, when we only had 150K members we had selectable number of posts per page as well.
I do not know what other customizations they have or the internal structure of their forums, but ours is setup in a way that exceeded the capacity of the VBul DB and we had to alter it. Funnily enough I cannot even check it out since that forum displays a blank page for me Maybe it was trying to display too many posts

 

[BjornB]

The problem is the game registration solution (with the icons) causing an unusual load on the servers compared to "standard" vBulletin installations.

 

[BjornB]

so all the separate groups they require are that bad?

We are currently running the forums pretty much at max capacity, but changes are inbound and I can only apologize it takes time. I don't dare go into much detail about the structure or problems either, as I don't know what such information could be used for if in the hands of malicious people.