This happens to me when I am using my mouse scroll wheel to scroll up a thread, rather than using the onscreen drag thing. I hope that’s clear. Anyway, after scrolling through some small number of screens’ worth of posts, the thing will skip upwards a few posts, and I have to scroll back and find where I was and start from there.
It doesn’t seem to happen when I’m scrolling down. It doesn’t require any particular kind of content in a post for it to happen (such as a big visual link) – at least not so far as I can tell. That was my first thought, so after that I was trying to see when it happened, but I could not detect a pattern. This is the only site where I get this effect.
It’s been happening for a few weeks, I guess. I finally got PO’d enough at it to report it here. Does this happen to anyone else?
Finally, please don’t get off on a tangent about why I do this kind of scrolling. I do it, and I should be able to do it without it causing a problem. Thank you.
It seems to me that there are two different issues.
The part about it not being smooth is not easy to fix. You have to actually make the page longer to do it.
But it should be possible to keep the user’s place a bit better. If you’re just slowly scrolling up, post by post, it would be nice if it would jump back to where the previous post was visible. Maybe even add a little link to jump back one post.
When clicking a notification, Discourse will often jump you down to the bottom. It also does this if you make a post. So there are always times when scrolling up is needed. Perhaps simply adding a quick way to jump back to where you were would be nice.
As far as I can tell, you can jump down to where you were, but not up.
If you watch the vertical scroll bar you can see when it’s about to jump. Look to see what post number you’re on, and then you can scroll back down to it after the jump.
If I am scrolling up it is because I am looking for something, usually a particular post. If I am watching the scroll bar, how am I able to keep looking at the posts to find what I’m looking for?
How likely is it that a poster is going to know the exact number of a past post they are looking for? I for one generally don’t. Should I be doing something differently?