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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again?

* Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason?

Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t.

Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.

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Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style.

Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”.

And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish.

Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.

I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...

It’s just the feeling! :-)

vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

Because it’s like swimming across a large lake finding yourself exhausted in the middle with little alternative to swimming back.

Now on my phone it’s relatively easy to jump to the top of the page. It’s also almost done impossible to jump to the bottom.

On a desktop I can at least mash the END key or play silly reindeer games with the scrollbar thumb.

On mobile it’s very hard to Leap or Surge or Jump.

If I’m madly fanning the page with my thumb or, worse, my fingers because I’m tired with my thumb, I pretty much just give up at that point.

I also like having non-endless scrolling because I can use the scroll bar as a gauge of how much is left of the article.

Being constantly fed is just a bad experience.

Terrible user experience. If it infinitely scrolls I can be sure some gesture on the phone will lose my spot and it will take ages to find where I was. Also they rarely play nice with the back button. There is usually a better way to present data.

For reading, do you prefer books or ancient scrolls?

Apollo (reddit client on iOS) solves this by having the same gesture undo itself -- tap at the top to scroll to the top of the reddit post, tap again to return to where you were.

I'm not saying your complaint is invalid, just that there are ways of mitigating the issue. And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

> I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

Presumably similarly to HackerNews threads, which are paginated.

Yes. Pagination can be bad if the URL indexes by 1-10, 11-20 etc. But I think HN paginates using the post ID, so that the links are permanent (?) which is a better way to do it. Basically the novel idea here is to treat the browser like a REST client.

This also means you need a predictable, deterministic algorithm, like "ORDER BY DATE DESC", but Reddit does have order by popularity, so that will not be idempotent. But now being super picky as order by popularity is pretty useful. Although I think date should be the default. And order by [what cambridge analytica-likes know about me] should be off.

HN also lets you elide branches with a click, so you're not trapped in a section you're not interested in. It's so nice opening a 400 response thread, getting 10 messages into the top comment, and clicking the hide button and watching 200 messages vanish.

Do you have a way to fold a branch once you're, as you say, 10 messages in? Or do you need to scroll back up to the parent to fold it? That's what I'm seeing and it's sub-optimal.

HackerNews threads aren't paginated, at least not for me. I just checked a post with 500 comments on it, and they all displayed in one long list.

HackerNews posts are paginated. And there isn't any interface for navigating the pages. Which is fine for HN's minimalist approach and tech-oriented audience. But it hardly seems optimal for a general audience.

> And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

It's not that hard. I saw good example of paginated threads at livejournal.com: it paginates root comments and collapses large subthreads. https://ammo1.livejournal.com/1348094.html?view=comments#com...

Yeah but how many people will discover that functionality themselves vs how much effort will you expend trying to educate the rest of your users? Pagination wins because there's nothing to learn, it's obvious where you are and how to get somewhere else.

Sounds reasonable. I am complaining about infinite scroll on the web. But inside a native app it might be better since there is more precise control of that experience. Assuming the app creator has done a good job.

The app creator has done a very good job. And is responsive if there is an issue.

Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle.

But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own.

It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.

Someone posted this on HN last month and I think it summarizes very well what people dislike the most about infinite scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617

Impossible to jump pages, know how much there is, often breaks native scrolling in awkward ways without recourse.

It often breaks the builtin Browser-Search.

Which is often followed by attempts to replace browser native Find in Page with a custom implementation that doesn't work as well.

And you love it, so much? It's probably the stupidest thing ever invented as far as UX goes.

It is possible the gp post just feels neutral about it. There are a whole range of emotions between love and hate.

I do feel neutral/indifferent about it. I was just wondering why I see so much negative sentiment towards it.

I feel vaguely-neutral/negative toward it. It plays somewhat annoyingly with things like bookmarking (mitigated slightly by the fact that infinite scrolls are usually generated content anyway so bookmarking them is probably meaningless) and are trying to tempt the user into endless scrolling (but I guess it is our responsibility to resist the temptation there).

It makes it impossible to get to the footer.

And impossible to link to anything behind the scroll interaction.

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