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Comment by codinghorror | Hacker News Reader

You are thinking of Nim with the white page; Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it! And of course everything is searchable. We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google.

As for the timestamp, click or hover over the timestamp to see the full date/time, etc.

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> Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it!

The only content is in a <noscript> tag, so this complaint is probably coming from people only blocking third party JS.

When reading a random Discourse forum I don't intend to participate in, blocking all JS usually results in a smoother experience than accepting scripts from discourse-cdn.com. The only exception I've found is for massive threads, because there's no JS-free search.

Don't take this the wrong way: Being indexed by Google does not add anything for me personally, as I am not using Google. If there is a forum, which can only currently be indexed by Google, then I might even see that as harmful to the web in general, as it adds incentive to users to use Google, instead of other search engines.

I have experienced it multiple times, that stuff is only in some discourse forum and I see a blank white page. Basically a JS-wall. Not sure, if the people, who hosted it did something weird to cause that issue, but that is the impression I have of discourse forums. Rarely I allow its scripts to run and make the effort to view some content in any such forum. Usually I just close the tab.

Edit: Now I know why I might have had that experience: I also block loads of third party CDNs. Perhaps they were trying to load scripts and resources from there and that's why nothing was shown.

Edit2: But you are also correct: The Nim one does not show anything without JS.

> We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google.

Google's crawler can index JS-only content just fine:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://forum.nim-lang....

I disable JS by default and had enabled JS for a couple of Discourse sites I read, but once it started working without JS I gladly disabled JS again because I find the consumption experience quite a bit better sans-JS: faster and more consistent with how the rest of the web works.

Discourse often shows a blank page with certain ad-blockers. JS is enabled, but the Discourse CDN gets blocked, so nothing displays unless the ad-blocking setting is overridden for that site. Some sites do load HTML, but others are blank.

FWIW JS apps are indexed by Google. I run FastComments, and the JS rendered comment threads are indexed.

With javascript disabled on mobile, you just get a header with links that don't work and "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" even on the official https://try.discourse.org/ site

What I don't understand is why discourse can't serve up content that isn't interactive. I get lazy loading if there are >1000 comments on a post, but for anything else, static content should be perfectly fine. Even when you have js on, ctrlf doesn't work because of dynamic loading so the site has to hijack the shortcut with different interaction patterns (pressing enter doesn't go to next result, it loads a separate page).

I just tested with the 999 comment post on that site. First page load with no cache is 5.98MB (1.25MB) and took 5.76s load time. Holding the end key to get to the bottom until I hit the last post downloads a total of 1.91MB (718KB transfer) and takes 70s! That's including all the pictures. That cannot be better than than loading all text and optionally deferring all img loads, right?

"Lets not load so much static content all at once, it will be slow!", but then serve megabytes of JS dependencies and perhaps some web fonts for good measure. Unfortunately this is becoming more common.

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