A few months ago, something changed on my computer, such that the hyper scroll thing moved from the right side of my screen, to the top.
So the problem is, if I return to a thread that I have not been in for a while, I am unable to rapidly get to the bottom to see the most recent posts, or to the top to use the hyper scroll thing.
The only way I can figure how to move up and down is using the side scroll lozenge or arrows - but either of those only move a few posts at a time.
Any ideas?
What OS, browser, and device are you using? An iPad, a PC, and an Android phone are very very different user experiences.
What do you mean by “hyper scroll”?
Dinsdale is referring to the scroll bar on the right that can take you all the way through a thread. I have had occasions (iPad) in which that scroller vanishes and I am left with two blue boxes at the bottom right with current/last post numbers in them. It usually corrects itself if I go to another thread.
I’m using an apple desktop, w/ I don’t know what old OS, and Chrome.
The scroll line used to be on the right side of whatever window. For some reason it changed.
If you are using actual windowing (not that full-screen abomination), sometimes resizing the window causes things to make adjustments.
Try the following.
From the Category view, clicking on the time since last post will take you tothe last post.
Clicking on the number of posts will offer you a choice of going to the first or last post.
Within the topic, pressing the # key brings up a dialog and you can typein a number to hop straight to that post (1 in your case).
Or you can click on the box which shows post no. of posts and get the same options.
Can you upload a screenshot showing what you see?
This chat site doesn’t allow people to post photos. They’d have to find some third party site, create an account, and otherwise jump through an unreasonable number of hoops to do that.
(Yes, I would like to allow photos here.)
Thanks. Those are great workarounds. Silly me - I never even thought those things were “clickable” - I always simply clicked on the thread title.
If I don’t even know my OS, do you think I could do that? 
As a rule of thumb in Discourse and other modern websites/apps, everything is clickable and does something. Exploration is often the only way to find out what anything does though.
There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to navigate around in Discourse. Including ones to jumping around in the thread from top to bottom with no need to fiddle with scrolling. When you are NOT composing a post, hit the “?” key to see a help screen listing them all.
I do NOT know how Mac-aware that help screen is. So you may have to Google up the Mac-equivalent of, e.g. the PC’s [End] key.
Thanks, man. That points to a significant shortcoming of mine. I just do not enjoy any tools that require that I experiment myself to learn how to use - even for basic uses. I simply do not see such things. And I’m never so bored that I simply want to click around trying to figure out how to do things.
It also drives me insane when technology changes, such that I need to relearn how to do things. Decades ago I gave up creating macros, when “updates” would render them useless.
So I pretty much participate in any technology on the most superficial basis possible.
Believe me when I say I feel your pain.
It would be friggin’ awesome if all apps and websites came with comprehensive user guides I could read. Not “help” that isn’t helpful.
As discussed about MSFT Word this morning over here:
The choice we’re each faced with is between stumbling around blindly doing {whatever} the hard way for months or years (or not being able to do it at all), versus stumbling around blindly at first to learn how to do everything we care about in the smart(est) / easy(est) way possible.
Either choice is respectable. It’s a variant of “Pay me now or pay me later.”
But both choices suck and are IMO evidence of the vendor’s entire software industry’s abdication of their responsibility to provide a complete product which includes a complete up to date manual and task-centric help and a highly discoverable design.
The third choice (for any popular piece of software) is googling it. 
If you have a question or a problem, the chances are that the solution is out there and you can find it with a quick search. There are probably also tutorials on YouTube for any software that’s widely used.
Getting back to the autofill issue, when I first started using the “@” to tag posters, the suggestions it came up were all random and posters that I’d never heard of before, nor remembered them posting.
However, the more I use it, the more the suggested posters are recognizable.
Today, when I hit @ in this message, it brings up Tripler, Qadgop, What Exit, HMS Irruncible and Puzzlegal. (Plus Discobot. It always brings up Discobot in this thread.)
No idea why that particular group, except they’ve all been active in this thread? When I hit “@” in the eletion watch thread earlier this morning, it brought up all recognizable posters who had been posting in that thread.
At any rate, I think there is some “training” function going on with Discourse, based on past posting practices, or activity within a thread.
And if you type the first letter or two of one of those names, does the name remain in the suggested list, or does it disappear?
If one of the names is the one I’m looking for, I click on it and bring it up.
sure, but have you tried typing a letter or two, to see what happens?
Yes, I just did it over in another thread - wanting to @ Leo_Bloom. As I was typing, it came up.
Cool. So maybe if you remember people’s exact names, and use the search function a lot, it eventually becomes user-friendly. There’s no way I’m getting over that first hurdle. For me, it’s just completely broken. I’ve really been missing being able to search, too. 
I’ve been curious about him, odd character though he was. He seems to have evaporated just before the Discourse switchover. And wasn’t a very busy poster in the months leading up to that.
I know he lived on Manhattan in NYC and I believe both he and his wife had chronic health issues. One hopes he’s OK, just offline.