Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.
I've found loading to be extremely fast. Way faster than pagination on most traditional forums, even over a slow mobile connection. On desktop it usually loads faster than I can scroll. Guess it depends on which server you're using?
Same here. The old vBulletin / PHPbb format felt positively archaic once I got over the shock of how different the basic interactions are.
I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading.
Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
Curious what you mean by lack of proper threading in phpBB and vBulletin? Are you talking about threading of responses within a broader "Thread" (top-level post entry)
Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.
In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.
Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.
On the desktop, it also hijacks standard browser shortcuts such as Ctrl+F.
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I've found loading to be extremely fast. Way faster than pagination on most traditional forums, even over a slow mobile connection. On desktop it usually loads faster than I can scroll. Guess it depends on which server you're using?
Example of a long thread, just so we're all on the same page: https://meta.discourse.org/t/trading-buttons-buy-sell-exchan...
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Same here. The old vBulletin / PHPbb format felt positively archaic once I got over the shock of how different the basic interactions are.
I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
> The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
Maybe feature parity with classic pagination from 20 years ago. Discord takes forever to load content when scrolling.
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I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower and has vastly less information density
Security-wise etc. it's probably better than a pile of (I'm guessing) mostly abandoned/assumed 'done' dependencies.
But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.
I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading.
Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
Curious what you mean by lack of proper threading in phpBB and vBulletin? Are you talking about threading of responses within a broader "Thread" (top-level post entry)
e.g. for a refresher some random vbulletin site: https://forums.devx.com/forumdisplay.php?105-VB-Classic
Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.
interesting, they did at some point have a threading option but I hated it. I preferred reading comments in time order and threads were clunky to me.
Do you ever use forums for asynchronous communication?
discoverability
answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines
Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse
An interface like PHPBB or vBulletin, combined with the Markdown formatting + live preview and tagging/search of Discourse, would be ideal for me.
I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...
Does vBulletin have a way yet to jump to the first new reply in a thread?
Well, in Discourse press the pound key to jump to any date or specific post. Press ? to see the full set of keyboard shortcuts.