Aww! There it is.
@discobot fortune
Jerk!
You think that’s cheeky, we’re working on an automated STFU response.
Will it come with a badge?
You should earn badge “Donny” if any of your posts get 3 rolleyes smiles in response.
I want a Karen badge. In fact I DEMAND a Karen badge. Right now!!!111!!
Maybe you should talk to DIscobot.
I’m hoping there’s a badge for multiple-posting about the new board-software’s MAJOR ANNOYANCE: the jumping away from where you are reading, to some random post from down-thread, when the scroll-bar gets down to the bottom-but-you’re-still-not-near-the-end of some infinite-scroll thread.
Just let the automated system try to shame me for mentioning it again. Just let it try.
@discobot, you got a dare.
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
???
Have you started a thread on this? I’ve read this post multiple times. I can’t figure out the behavior you’re describing. The software moves to another post by itself while you’re reading? How does the scroll get to the bottom when it’s not the end of the thread? Are you using the slider, the jump to feature or some other way to get to the bottom of the thread? Is it just paused to load more posts or is it just stuck at some random post?
About fucking time.
As my post said, it happens “when the scroll bar gets down to the bottom” of the screen. I’ve been manually (with the mouse–I read the site on a desktop) moving said scroll bar. If a thread is just a few dozen posts long, like this one is, the behavior doesn’t occur.
But in a thread with hundreds of posts, once I move the bar down to the bottom, the screen jumps over the next few posts I haven’t seen, to a post that’s maybe ten away from the post I had been reading.
(Just guessing at that “ten”–I haven’t kept records. The jump may be over some number of posts or some number of characters. And it may be a set amount of content that gets skipped, or it may be an amount of content that’s some fraction of the thread total. No idea on any of that.)
Obviously on ‘infinite scrolling’ pages, there has to be some mechanism to load new content—in other words, if you open a thread with 2,000 posts, the page you open does NOT have all 2,000 posts loaded. Some number of posts are loaded when you open the thread page, then as you scroll down, more load.
My issue is with the way they load. If more loaded but the screen remained at the post I’d been reading, there would be no issue. But what happens here is that when the jump occurs, I have to scroll back up some random number of posts and find the place at which I’d been reading before the jump happened.
I have no idea if this is considered an unfixable problem, or if it’s coded this way because the coders figured no one would care if they had to go search for the place they’d been before the jump.
I find it very, very annoying.
they haven’t written a message that says “you have a bad, bad, bad amount of posts in this topic” yet 
OK, I’ve been trying to replicate what you’re saying. My guess is that you’re using your browser’s scroll bar to scroll to the bottom of the page, but the browser has to load more content, so it’s not really at the bottom of the page.
If you use the Discourse scroll bar, you can quickly scroll to the bottom of the page or to any post you choose in multiple post threads. That’s the blue bar to the right with the post count.
When you’re composing a post, you can click on the post counter at the top of the preview screen and the Discourse scroll bar appears on the right where the preview screen normally goes, then when you get to the post you want and stop, the preview screen and writing screen show back up.
You have to hold down the scroll bar, and you can read a smaller version of the thread where the preview screen is.
Alternatively, you can hit the down arrow button in the top right corner of the reply screen , and the reply screen minimizes, you can go back to reading using the Discourse scroll bar, then open the reply portion back up if you see something else you want to reply to.
I’m on desktop on Straight Dope light theme, but I’m guessing it works the same way on all of them.
Thanks for writing that out, Heffalump_and_Roo—I appreciate the effort. The Discourse scroll bar does show up better in Straight Dope Light than in the Sam’s Simple interface I’d been using.
Any software change requires some time to get used to. In some cases the functionality really does differ, and in ways both positive and negative. There are things about Discourse I prefer to vBulletin. But the scrolling is not one of them—fussing with the Discourse bar takes more time than with the old site, and in general I get a lot less read here in the same amount of time, as compared with vBulletin. Familiarity won’t change that; it’s just a difference in functionality.
Of course I’m glad the SDMB made the changeover, as it’s likely to extend the life of the site (due to lower cost).
But there will always be some things that don’t work as well as they did on the vBulletin version; that’s an inevitable aspect of changing software. (There are other features that are an improvement on vBulletin, of course.)
I get that. It’s often difficult to get used to any changes to a place. Old habits die hard. When I get to the bottom of any thread, I reflexively push the scroll bar to the top of the page. It does nothing. But it takes more conscious thought for me to stop doing it than I’m willing to give it right now. Over time though, I’m expecting that the extra motion will lessen when nothing happens over and over.
In the same way, the way that the threads are structured leaves me without a visual in my head that I was used to. I used to keep a visual reminder in my head of the page number and place in the page where I wanted to reply to someone. That doesn’t exist anymore. What exists is a bookmark feature that allows me to bookmark any post I want to remember and even a reminder feature to give me a heads up if I choose. (If you haven’t seen it, hit the three dots under any post, it will show a picture of a bookmark, hit that and the reminder preferences show up. Then to find them, click your avatar and click on the bookmark icon again and the bookmarks all show up.) It’s an elegant feature and one that probably makes more sense than just my remembering, but it takes effort for me to remember the feature.
Hopefully, over time, this will all become second nature as posting on the old site was.
Good luck in finding more things you like about the site (and dealing with the negative.)
@Sherrerd –
If I’m reading you aright, you’re using your mouse to drag the scroll bar down. If the thread is long, with many posts, then moving the scroll bar a short distance will scroll you down many posts. So for a very long thread, moving the scroll bar even a very short distance could easily jump you down a dozen posts or a hundred posts. As best I can understand what you’re describing, that seems to be what you’re seeing.
It appears that that’s not the way Discourse is set up. It would work that way if all the posts of (say) a 3,000-post thread loaded when you click on the thread—but they don’t all load. Only 20 or so load (I think–could be off with that number, but whatever it is, it’s smallish). That’s why I get the ‘jump’ that bothers me when I manually move the browser scroll-bar down to the bottom of the page.
As H_and-R explained the way to avoid that is to use the Discourse scroll bar instead of the browser scroll bar.
Of course it’s probably possible to program the ‘jumps’ to leave the page centered on the particular post that was visible on the page before the jump occurred, instead of leaving the page eight or ten posts below the post that was visible on the page when the jump occurred. Or perhaps that’s not possible at all, and is considered an unsolvable problem. I have no idea which might be true.
But the situation you describe is probably the reason for the ‘load only 20 posts then do a jump when get to the 20th and try to scroll down further’ situation, because it DOES have the virtue of preventing the ‘scroll bar, moved just a centimeter, moves you hundreds of posts from where you were.’ THAT would be a serious problem for navigating a message board, and the Discourse coders wisely avoided it.