Once I got used to the infinite scroll, which did take some doing at first, I found that with the aid of the sidebar I can keep oriented in a thread much better and more easily than I could (or can on other boards) with separate pages.
I suspect this may have to do with subtle differences in the way people’s minds work.
I don’t have much trouble keeping oriented in either style. It’s really just that a thread that says “274 unread posts” looks like work, in a way that 7 new pages doesn’t. And i found it easier to skim past a few pages than to skim through all those posts.
Agreed on paging being good for skimming. Paging also allows the native browser text search, which is far superior to discourse’s homebrew text search.
That’s true.
A useful feature in navigating long threads is the # shortcut.
Just press # (when you’re not in the editor) and you can enter either a post number, or a date to jump to.
I use that all the time to get to the start or end of a thread. I don’t find any other options terribly useful. I also find it’s a little flakey, and doesn’t always work. That is, the “move to” menu doesn’t always open when i attempt to trigger it.
It doesn’t work for you to click on the date or time at the top and bottom of the scroll bar?
I mostly use this in my phone, and there are no dates on the scroll bar. But i can click on the numbers at the bottom of the page.
(Even on my laptop, i need to put Discourse in a very wide window to get the discourse scroll bar, which i find very annoying.)
Ah.
My phone’s a flip phone chosen for water and drop resistance, and for ease of carrying in pockets. The screen is so tiny that it would be effectively impossible to use this board on it (it’s actually close to impossible to do anything online at all, but that’s not what I use it for.) And due to my eyesight I prefer a wide separate desktop-size screen and window for nearly everything, anyway.
A lot of this does seem to depend on how one’s reading the boards.
That’s great. I hated that the asterisk wouldn’t work without fiddling.
This is also very useful. Thanks.
Still hate Discourse. Everything about it. It’s ugly, awkward, difficult to navigate, and infinite scrolling is the worst.