Pages are still an arbitrary demarcation, unlike book chapters, which are usually logical breaks in the stream-of-thought of the book. Not to mention the fact that different users used different page lengths (I went with 100, for less next-ing – which of course meant my browser had to load a lot of posts so that I could read that one 99th post on the page). My page length could put post 350 in sequence with post 351, where they would fit together as part of a conversation, whereas 50-post paging would break them apart on pages, making the content flow less well.
The other downside to paging was that, for one reason or another, you might fail to notice that you had not reached the end of a thread and end up posting a comment that was out of place because 25 intervening posts had been added unbeknownst to you. With the live refresh on Discourse, a thread left open in that one tab no longer acquires a bunch of unseen posts while you were over doing something else. That is a good thing.
I don’t get the problem with different users using different page lengths. That didn’t affect me and my fifty-post pages. My pages 5 and 6 may have been your Page 3, but I wasn’t telling you to look for anything on Page 5. I was remembering that I should look back for a discussion on Page 5. That gave me a sense of place in the thread, even if the divisions were purely arbitrary, as you point out. The arbitrariness was only a trivial drawback AFAIWC.
And yeah, I’d occasionally fail to notice that the last post on the page wasn’t the last post in the thread, but that happened to me rarely enough that I wasn’t bothered by it.
Yeah, i basically keep track of my world spacially. And there’s no sense of location here. So i always feel slightly lost. It’s just a lot level of anxiety the forum gives me now.
You can also use the bookmarking tools in your browser as a third or fourth line of defense, if necessary. Here’s how for mobile, I just booted up my Android devices to test them too:
Android / Chrome
Tap on the browser menu (top right of the screen) for options.
At the top of that options menu, look for the Bookmark Icon. It’s shaped like a star
Tap on the star to save the page as a Bookmark.
Once you’ve created the bookmark, open the menu again and select the word “bookmarks” to see the list of bookmarks.
iOS / Safari
Tap on the “send” icon at (bottom of the browser) … it looks like a box with an arrow pointing up
Tap the words “add bookmark”
Once you’ve created the bookmark, select the “open book” icon at the bottom of the browser to see the list of bookmarks.
The advantage of using the browser’s built in bookmarking capability as a backstop is that they work on all websites, and all devices – the browser will typically do a bookmark sync across all logged in devices.
Ah yes, that’s something I forgot, we added that recently. Thank you for pointing that out. Minimizing the editor will show the topic name, regardless of who the post is “in reply to”, the topic, or a particular post.
Printing a topic is also a valid way to generate “one giant page” on demand, thanks for sharing that option, I always forget printers… exist, but print can have other purposes. It’s almost like a “reader mode” hack for some websites as they usually have simple print stylesheets.
You may be interested in the # key. That will let you jump to an arbitrary point in a topic, either by post number or date. The post numbers are visible when you click or tap on the date at the upper right of each post, but if you want “just the middle” or “near the end” you can do a quick estimate based on the visible post count; right now there are 305 replies to this topic, so if I really wanted to plop myself in the middle, I’d quickly type
#, 150, enter
As usual, to see a full list of keyboard shortcuts, press ?.
In a fast moving thread, I’d occasionally hit the button, on the thread listing page, for the last page, not realizing that when I read the thread last it was on page 5 and it’s now on 7. Generally not that big of a deal other than people telling you you’re repeating things that were already mentioned, but in a game of Mafia I had a hell of a time defending my posts that, to everyone else, made little sense.
It’s not so much that I have concerns, as that I’ve used both paginated and unpaginated sites, and I find pagination more comfortable to read.
If there are 50 posts, yes, a single seemless experience is better than 5 little pages. But once you get to large topics, perhaps 100-250 posts, pagination is just easier. It’s easier to jump around (I don’t have to pick some precise number, with the cognitive burden that choice entails). It’s easier to find something when you vaguely remember “where was I when I read that?”
I’ll point out that this is not a new problem, invented in the computer age. Once upon a time, we wrote words on scrolls, that endlessly paginated. Then actual pages, with page numbers, were invented.
I still use a Torah scroll from time to time. Because of the ritual significance, the object hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. But how many books have you purchased in scroll form, and how many with pages? Paginated books completely won in the marketplace because they provide a better user experience.
Again, if the list is small, sure, I’d rather get it all at once. I hate little pages when I’m shopping on line. But once the list of items is so large that it’s not efficient to load all at once, it’s not efficient for me to “page through it” without pages, either.
Like many people, i remember space better than i remember numbers.
I use that feature all the time to get to the beginning or the end of a topic. But i find it quite useless to get to something i read a while ago, um…i don’t remember exactly when… But the list of page numbers at the top of the screen was about so big…
But thank you, @mordecaiB , and @codinghorror , for assisting with tips and tricks. It really is appreciated.
Of course! One size does not fit all, but we do try… and we’re serious about trying to make it a little bit better, each day, every day… tending to our small open source garden.
The idea is the software should empower the people, and avoid the world turning into a Facebook company town…
Also, if you’re the type of person to use bookmarks a lot, you can bookmark pages. I’m not a bookmarker, but if there’s a long discussion and I need to go back and forth, it’s nice to open different pages in different tabs.
Hence my suggestion to at least making pagination an option. Certainly, make infinite scroll the default. But I think a lot of people would be really happy if we had the option to break threads into pages. At the very least, the fact that clicking on a thread will automatically bring you to the last post you were at makes this workable. But even then, it still screws with our ability to use the standard ctrl-f since it can only access a few posts on either side of the current location.
I may whine about this feature or that, but I’m very grateful that there’s open source chat software that is still under active development. Facebook and Reddit have eaten so much of the on-line world, but both have major issues when it comes to civil discussion.
Though I have not used it to speak of, the Discourse bookmark function looks very convenient for what you describe. You bookmark a post (perhaps the start of an exchange), it goes into your bookmark list and you can jump right to it (user-menu->bookmark-icon->bookmark-menu). Deleting old bookmarks is quite easy (though, I think I would like to have a folders option like with vB subscriptions to allow personal archive bookmarks to be stored out of the way).
Maybe try Discourse in a browser? I use Firefox on my Android phone. Renders fine. I tried multiple tabs. It works. I don’t post much that way because I don’t like the small keyboard on my phone, but that doesn’t seem to apply to you.
Discourse might get confused but it will survive. There’s a cool feature that reminds you if you have two drafts of the same post open, and you’re editing a new draft. I use tabs on my computer and have run into that feature a couple times.
Intuition comes from experience. Myst was non-intuitive because it was the first game of its genre. There was no experience with it before. At this point, people expect the unexpected in those kinds of games. It is now intuitive. Upping the game leads to some level of non-intuitive response.
Did GreenWyvern’s option work for you? I like it better than clicking on each page and waiting for it to load and then putting up the search term again. Then again, the search feature on Discourse works ok for me for this purpose. The highlighted terms works on my setup.
I do suggest avoiding the app – really the only reason to use the app is if you require native iOS notifications. On Android, we can do native notifications via the browser.
The browser is a safer bet, since there’s less variables. The app is basically a repackaged browser anyhow.
bookmarking tools in your browser as a third or fourth line of defense, if necessary. Here’s how for mobile, I just booted up my Android devices to test them too:
at the bottom of the browser to see the list of bookmarks.
