pasquinelli i prefer pagination to infinite scroll. if the thread is new to me i usually want to read the first posts, then the most recent posts, but the scrollbar for the thread’s entire history is finicky.
Providing feedback to feedback again but I agree. Or, maybe. This is certainly something I would want to open a discussion about if it would be possible to reconfigure it to something else.
The main reason I don’t like the infinite scroll is because it makes it impossible to search an individual thread using ctrl+f, because only a portion of the thread is visible on the page and thus able to be searched using ctrl+f. My life depends on ctrl+f! As I demonstrated above I have a tendency to skim sometimes and not be able to control my compulsion to begin responding before I’ve taken a second pass at something, sometimes when I feel I’ve gotten a good idea based on a word or phrase, it’s because someone else mentioned it already and I just failed to put that into the ol’ working memory as someone else saying it first.
Basically, the infinite scroll tool is good for getting you to the top and the bottom of a thread, but it sucks for bringing you anywhere in between with any sort of precision. So it’s kind of like a Metroid Prime 3 overdesigned interface for an Home and End key smushed in with Page Up and Page Down buttons that increase the distance on the page they travel as the thread grows, which, frankly, Sucks. And the Search function in the forum isn’t great either, in general. You generally can’t search for anything beyond a distinctive single word because the search function doesn’t allow you to specify a specific sequence of words, even by putting it into quotation marks, so I find that even if I can remember a specific turn of phrase in a post I want to find it’s not very useful unless I’m looking for distinctive words.
If you have never used the search function on the forum, I will give you a demonstration of its efficacy. Type “final fight” into the search bar and press enter. Wait, the default return will be the usernames of forum users, or something. But then the first result is talking about fight sticks and then the next roughly ten results are about Final Fantasy.
However I know we have some posters who need to manage their data usage carefully, so we definitely have to keep that in mind. I can’t think of any other major disadvantage to another approach but if this would make the forum less usable for those people it’s a dealbreaker in my eyes.
Perhaps there is some sort of compromise between this and Is it possible to implement a button that will load an entire thread at once? That would make it searchable with ctrl+f and less data intensive, right?
