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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.

PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

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Some times I get confused at what I’m looking at with discourse. The scrolling timeline thing is super confusing . Much rather have paging.

Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination.

You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.

Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.

The issue with discourse is it isn’t infinite scroll. They break up the timeline into the right side and if you have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time periods thinking you just want the original post and the new stuff.

It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.

Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

> Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking to be reliable.

This is correct. A problem with a sensible solution. When you scroll through NodeBB your address bar updates with the context of where you are. Copying that address will return you to where you were.

Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.

I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.

Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo.

Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.

It has been a problem, that's why there aren't several million more phpbb users. Discourse is filling a niche that hasn't been filled. Slack and Discord aren't right, but unfortunately phpbb isn't it either.

> not a giant scrolling doomswheel

Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.

Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...

Have you tried it? Check it out e.g. [1].

1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.

[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...

It's not as awful as I would have suspected from the description, but I still don't really like it. Bar the fancy "scrollbar" timeline they give you to jump directly somewhere in the page - which does alleviate that problem I mentioned a little - it does feel exactly like infinite scrolling to me, I'm not sure where you're making the distinction between lazy loading and this. The content does physically appear later on the page, making the scrollbar jump around, which I heavily dislike. This renders the native scrollbar pretty much useless as a reference point.

The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.

> Have you tried it?

Yes, it’s awful.

> Check it out e.g.

Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.

How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.

How is navigating millions of comments in a paginated thread any better? That's more than 25 000 pages.

Hmm... man I tried to like this stuff and used it with good faith. No idea why I don't like non-static UIs. I just want everything like a static page, almost like a physical analog piece of paper. Nothing moves. The monitor is like a loupe that I scan through on a giant canvas. I can empathize with people that like new fangled UIs, problem is with me.

It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum from having both features. A forum I'm on has the classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through the forum in whatever fashion they like.

Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?

tl.net, display all.

I agree with all this. But I was talking about the full-text search and tags, which (at least in my opinion) is way better than the old forum engines.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1529...

Reading their latest announcement makes me question how alive they are. Feels like an announcement from 5 years ago.

Yeah I actually thought about using it for a project for a second, but they're praising how it now uses PHP7, recaptcha 2, Symfony 3...

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