I think this is old ground Anahata but there does seem to be various ways to go about getting where you want to be in a thread. The most common is perhaps giving individual links (1 2 3, etc for each page).

I work on a different principle to Mudcat in that I believe every member has different ideas as to how they normally want to access a thread and different speed capabilities in terms of access. I give one simple link but allow members to chose what that link should do, ie, (within limits) decide how many posts a page should open, decide whether the last page or the fist page should be opened first and whether the thread should be opened in ascending or decending order - anyone can set up as they wish.

The biggest criticm I have received with this approach is the lack of a Mudcat like listing of posters at the top of a thread (something I can find handy but dislike on balance because of the ammount of scrolling down it can cause). I did try it and could have made it an option but got no feedback as to how it should work (should it index every page or just the one page?). It's one you need to be careful on though if you allow variable page sizes or changed the page size. The last time I looked, a direct link to a post here like http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=59418&messages=3612&page=9#959130 would fail if it was decided that as general speed had increased and 75 posts would be a more comfortable level - the reason being bookmark #959130 would no longer land on page 9.

Jon