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Comment by svnpenn | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness. I've always been confused by Discourse. Discourse was supposed to be the modern answer to all the homegrown PHP forum solutions of the previous decade. Instead, it just ended up being yet another bloated JavaScript web app. And given who the creator was, especially disappointing.

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Are you speaking from a developer or user perspective? As an user, I've always found Discourse to exceptionally user friendly and fluid to use. I find it a chore to navigate a forum that is not using Discourse.

Agreed. I was initially pretty turned off by the app-iness of Discourse, but after using it for awhile I've come around and actually enjoy it quite a bit now.

Dynamic loading and their scroll hijacking makes Discourse horrible to browse.

Would you rather have click + wait to refresh the whole page to see the next 10 post on that thread?

> Would you rather have click + wait to refresh the whole page

Considering it'd be faster than what discourse does, yes.

> to see the next 10 post on that thread?

If your forum has unconfigurable 10-post pages I would suggest getting a better forum software? One decades-old forum I frequent loads its default 40-post pages in half the time it takes discourse to load a new section, and using half the data, despite having to reload the entire HTML page.

And it doesn't waste a third the screen on a virtual thread scrollbar.

Of course.

What's wrong with Discourse: (and other silly scroll-hijacking pages):

1. Scrollbar no longer works properly when you try to navigate thread up and down. Normally you make mental note where there is something, and you can go back to it. But in Discourse, it isn't there, because you scrolled down, it loaded more replies, now you go back and there's something else in there.

2. You slowly drag scrollbar with your mouse. You near end of the page... it loaded more content, and now because you're still slowly dragging scrollbar, it again warps to the end, and WTF just happened, where is the thing I was reading!? Everything jumps and you just skipped dozens of replies.

3. Click any link. There's useless loading spinner, but oh well. Click any link, internal or external, and then go back. WTF!? I pressed back button, page should be in the same position it was before! It randomly snapped to some post, up, down, whatever, but it is somewhere else and now again, where is the thing I was reading!?

I cannot understand how anybody thought this was good design. It is horrible. Besides issue 3 which presumably could be fixed, issues 1 and 2 are fundamental problems. You cannot have page that have dynamic height and at the same time have scrollbar that is remotely useful. If you really insist on dynamic loading (and I don't know why you would, plain old HTML page is faster anyway), you could preallocate page height so it will work properly, but then you're back to square one: you need pagination.

Instead of using the browser scroll bar I use the thread scroll bar. Thread scroll bar is not affected by dynamic loading.

I think Discourse remembers where you were in a given thread and takes you back there when you enter is again.

You’re using the browser scroll bar when reading the text of a page to scroll through the text?

I’ve never heard or noticed anybody doing this. You must go crazy on infinite scroll webpages.

I’m using the PageUp and PageDown keys for page wide navigation and the arrow keys for the lineheight movements. On a desktop machine I’m using the scroll wheel as well.

I would only use the scroll bar for pixel perfect positioning of the viewport.

The fact that discourse hijacks ctrl-f drives me insane. Sometimes I want to jump to a particular part of a thread featuring a word quickly, but discourse gets in the way.

And, though this is more subjective, I find the UI confusing. I end up browsing the github issues or even reddit for answers to questions just to avoid discourse on projects that use it (discuss.linuxcontainers.org - I'm looking at you).

Discourse doesn't load the whole thread, it's loaded on demand (which is a reasonable choice for many enormous threads), so "quickly" would instead be "not at all".

which is why phpbb or even (god forbid) reddit is more ergonomic to use for me. If the thread is enormous, then split it into pages. And if it's not enormous, the discourse solution ends up being heavier and slower than just loading the whole discussion at once.

Discourse's voodoo ends up being more annoying to me than useful, not unlike infinite scrolling.

(obviously this is all subjective..I can only speak to the fact that I get annoyed by it and thus instinctively avoid discourse when I can)

You still have to go through multiple pages in phpbb and similar old forum in long threads. Same issue, usually slower than scrolling down bring the apparent end of page in discourse

> You still have to go through multiple pages in phpbb and similar old forum in long threads.

Except for long threads the start of the thread is usually irrelevant beyond the first page or so (if even that) so you can just jump to a few pages from the end and go from there. Good forum software remains comfortable to use at million-post threads, and will render 100-post pages in a small fraction of a second.

IME discourse's "infinite loading" nonsense is just slow and a mess. Go check the Rust discourse's crate of the week thread, it is a slow mess to navigate, the browser's scrollback gets hopelessly lost, and of course the in-page search is broken.

That's a thread of a thousand comments, it's quite literally nothing, and for all that it completely fucks up your history to boot.

In phpBB and other traditional forum software you can just jump straight to the last page.

You can jump to any point in the thread with the Discourse thread scroll bar too.

which goes back to the confusing UI. why should there be a different scroll bar to use than the standard one?

There is no usable standard scroll bar on mobile.

Not sure if I am reading you correctly, but you have to tap on the x/y label to see the thread scroll bar on mobile.

I meant the standard UI scroll bar. On iOS and Android you have no usable scroll bar.

It is only a location indicator (which is of course completely useless on infinite scroll pages).

... because it's not possible to load the whole thread at once, so the normal scroll bar will be jumping up and down as you scroll to load content on demand. And really, if you want to jump to a particular post in a long thread, the special scroll bar is easier than pages anyways because it's continuous.

Really, the scroll bar IS a fresh take on the page list, except it's actually useful for navigating the thread and doesn't force readers to deal with the useless concept of numbered pages when such arbitrary divisions are no longer the primary way of navigating the thread. Once you choose to not implement explicit pages (and accept that it's not possible to load the whole thread in one request), the thread scroller is a natural consequence.

On the desktop you can press the “End” key to jump directly to the last message.

Navigating with PageUp and PageDown in a Discourse thread feels smoother than in a phpBB where you eventually have to hunt for the “next page” link.

I think if you press Ctrl+f twice Discourse re-routes to browser search.

Possibly, but it does not work as Discourse implements dynamic loading of longer threads.

I use F3 to jump to next instance of the word I am searching. (Shift + F3 goes backward)

It's an alternative to Discourse though, e.g. it's a SPA. Nothing I see in the description entices me in the least... and phpBB and others are still being developed, and still rock.

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