I might consider using the slider bar, but I access this place exclusively from my phone. The slider bar is already nearly microscopic and only gets smaller as the thread grows. And I have largish clumsy thumbs and fingers
From your phone: click on the blue box with “3/156” or whatever the numbers are, at either the top or the bottom of the screen, indicating the post numbers. That open up a bigger slider window.
Agreeing with Snowboard_Bo. That’s exactly one of the issues I have. And it’s even worse trying to find a recent thread. If I’m trying to find a thread from a few days ago and only remember one or two words from the title search within page won’t find it unless I’ve already scrolled down far enough for it to appear on the screen. And using the Discourse search button shows matches in no particular order. For example, there’s a thread about jigsaw puzzles in the game room from mid June. It’s far enough back that search within page can’t find it. The first match in the Discourse search is to a thread that was last posted to in 2003.
Very cool, and helpful too. Thanks needscoffee, may your uncaffienated state be happily resolved
I use that on my phone as well.
@dorkvader, try other themes. Some work better than others.
What about using your activity list? (Click on your avatar at the top, your name, then Activity.) Clicking on any of your posts listed there will take you right to it.
I am not a fan of infinite scrolling but the slider bar has helped a bit. I have learned about some other problems I have with infinite scrolling, though, that I hadn’t realized before the SDMB switch-over.
- My browser history. Everytime a thread scrolls, I get a new entry in my browser history. If I scroll down, I get a new entry (with the name of the thread.) If I then scroll back up, I get a new entry! I use my browser history a lot and viewing this board clogs it up big time.
- The Command-F style search-search-in-page. I just posted to a thread about spoken words in songs with a link to a 17 year old thread (here on the SDMB) about spoken word intros. I knew that I had posted in that old thread and that someone had responded to me. Well, it was pretty easy to find the thread from my ‘account’ page because I have relatively few posts. But after I linked the page and I wanted to find every example of my handle - my posts and all responses - I expected to be able to Command F and enter my handle. It came up blank. I had to scroll down and search. Then scroll down and search. Then scroll down and search. Repeat ad nauseum.
If the current unscrolled load didn’t have ‘Zelski’ it said nothing. If I scrolled down once, it only searched that new scroll - not even the original part. If I scrolled down six times and then searched, it only ‘remembered’ the most recent scroll, so that is the 10-15 posts around that scroll down, meaning posts ~70 to 80. It would not search posts ~15 to ~70 even though I did scroll through those posts. Using the slider bar just jumped right past them.
I am starting to dislike the search-within-a-thread capability, because if I search for a word I want to get taken directly to the word, not to a post that contains the word somewhere and I’ll have to look for again.
It would be different if the slider bar / infinite scrolling kept everything in on the page on your screen like Facebook does, so once you’ve loaded everything you can control-f-control-f the entire thread. If there’s a way to do that on Discourse I don’t know of one.
This is really pissing me off. It’s making it impossible to find things in my browser history.
Same here! Hundreds of entries all for the same few pages.
In mine, it helps to check “recently closed tabs” and/or “recently closed windows”; those don’t seem affected by the history hijack. A nuisance to have to do it that way, though; and I agree that it’s really annoying that discourse does that.
Sadly, not an option on my phone. I just looked: as a single example, I have 6 entries for a thread today in which I read 1 new post.
After posting here, I got a nice condolence email from Balthisar talking about some guy named Atwood who seemingly has a lot to do with Discourse and who seemingly hates pages.
In contrast to Atwood’s apparent thoughts, I’d like to point out (to him? he isn’t here though) that Discourse does use pages after all! The problems with Discourse include:
- That the pages are small (I guessed around 10 posts)
- They aren’t numbered
- They aren’t stored due to the non-existent numbering (duh!)
- Sometimes, Discourse will rip off the bottom of one page and append it to the top of the next page. (this happens when you slider-bar your way to the top of what might have been a ‘page’)
In the example I gave in my earlier post, after I scrolled down six times, I am looking at Page 7, but Discourse won’t call it that. In the same mind-set, you can normally only command F the current page you are on; lo! I can only command F that page 7.
I got this idea of mine from old RPGs. Around 1980, some RPG players started saying that they didn’t like the leveling system that was most common and used in D&D. Two relatively important systems that came out - HERO and GURPS - were touted as being not level-based. But in fact, they do have levels. I call them micro-levels as they were often only the size of 3 experience that you might spend to get one benefit like +1 DEX.
Maybe a change in mindset can be imported into Atwood’s brain and he will see that adding page numbers to pages that hold a lot more than 10 posts will be valuable. If he is just fighting a philosophical anti-page fight, he isn’t helping us and he is wrong; he still has small, not-useful, pages. And he intentionally crippled the pages that way for no benefit (to spite users?)
Well, I typed all this and now, looking back, it looks like a rant that will have no effect. I spent the time typing, though, so you lot are gonna have to read it!
Jeff Atwood is the creator of Discourse. He occasionally posts here as codinghorror.
Interesting observation about the practical effect of the implementation of continuous scrolling.
Search results are sorted by “Relevance,” but there’s a dropdown menu where you can also have them sorted by Latest Post or Latest Topic.
I hadn’t noticed that! My god, that’s awful! If there’s any way to change that, it must be changed!
I’m afraid that’s an inherent feature of how browsers work. Every time the browser loads content, that is a new call for content, so a new entry in the browser history. A serious reason for using actual pagination instead of partial thread loading and continuous scroll.
Not always’. If here is a blue 4 next to my avatar, I can see a list of 4 replies to my posts. But if I click to read one them, I can never recover that list to view the otheer 3… It’s gone forever.
How are you managing that?!!! If I click on a number next to my avatar, all of my notifications show up in a list continuing down and down and down, with the unread ones slightly highlighted at the top. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to clear the list only to be told that Discourse insists on keeping it forever.
Yours seems to be clearing when you don’t want it to.
Discourse is weird.
Except for the vanishing red line, I haven’t gone through anything weird here.
This is my “statistically insignificant” experience here.