Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse

Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by CM30 on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @04:32PM (#14250298)

Honestly, I think I (and a lot of people here) would probably prefer the numbers to what Discourse has at the moment. At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view. On Discourse you either scroll like mad and slowly load in crap, or click the last post and slowly scroll back up.

If I know something useful is on page 10... well I'm just out of luck.

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by accountyaccount on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @04:42PM (#14250372)

Asking some questions because I'm legitimately curious, I'm not super familiar with Discourse... but from admin'ing some other forum platforms, their choices seem logical to me. Is the implementation just bad?

>At least with numbered pagination you can choose to view page [whatever] to narrow down the posts you want to view

Assuming you mean sequentially, isn't this the same as scrolling but with a click involved? If you don't mean sequentially, how would you know which page to click?

>If I know something useful is on page 10...

How do you know something useful is on page 10? Is it normal for forum users to remember specific page numbers within a post?

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by detaro on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @06:42PM (#14251321)

Reasons you might want to address page numbers: Jumping ahead helps with skimming. You might (roughly) remember where you left off last. Other threads and page numbers are referenced in other threads (yes, people could link, but they don't always do)

I also like page sizes as "breaks" to follow up on links etc.

Discourse's implementation of infinite scroll isn't all that bad (it keeps position properly and doesn't seem to have strange glitches, although I haven't tried it on a bad connection), and at least navigation elements are there. But they feel strange and trip me up every time: the secondary "scroll bar", or in thinner browser windows the "progress bar" at the bottom that overlays the post content and you have to click to get the scroll bar pop up. It feels like a mobile app, half-way designed for touch, not a forum.

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by accountyaccount on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:56PM (#14252185)

Interesting. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by int_19h on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @06:43PM (#14251332)

Yes, it is actually pretty normal to remember such things, if it's a thread that you have read before, or otherwise kept track of.

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by phaylon on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @05:45PM (#14250921)

At least for posts, on discourse forums I see a control on the right where I can go to specific posts. It's useful because it also shows you what date you are jumping to.

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Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by ljw1001 on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:13PM (#14277519)

Sure, but how frequently would you know that something useful is on page 10? It doesn't seem like a very common use case to me. You can only optimize so many things at one time. Maybe this is a thing that's worth optimizing, but I think it's debatable.

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