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Comment by mishac | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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