Where are the pages within a topic?

In the old forum a given topic only displayed a fixed number of entries per page, and there were page numbers one could scroll through to get back and forth within the topic. This was extremely useful in the round-robin topics, because most of them have pinned messages at the top of the threads hi how list available and traveling round robins and their status. In this new forum format, topics do not appear to be paginated, and one has to scroll up and down through 300 messages or more within a topic, and this will only grow worse over time.

Is there a way for the end-user to tweak a setting to display topics with pagination, or a way to implement this as a fix?

Navigation in this new format is not at all intuitive, and this particular issue is particularly frustrating.

Yeah I understand your pain. It’d take some time to get used to threads without pages. For a easier browse, you can just tap the date on the top to get you back to the first post or the pinned messages you are looking for.

2 Likes

Once you get used to it, you may find Discourse’s topic structure easier to navigate. I certainly do, even though I was skeptical at first. You can use the scroll bar on the right to quickly and easily go to any part of the topic. You can click the date at the top, or the topic title, to be taken to the first post. And it remembers where you are in the topic so that when you return to a topic you read before, you are taken exactly to where you left off.

Pagination was discussed in the test forum and it’s not going to be a feature of this new forum.

3 Likes

There are more navigation options, you can read about them here: Forum User Guide (The url should take you to the right place within the post.)

2 Likes

Thanks. Given that I’ve already spent hours staggering around here, I don’t think I’ll get used to it. That being said, i appreciate your tips. The steep learning curve with this new format has only served to increase my stress, the reverse of the purpose of Postcrossing in my life. For me, the fix is worse than than any issues I had with the original software, and the net result is that i am less likely to participate in the forums as a result.

Initially, I missed the page numbers. I have to use Postcrossing on different computers, and the page numbers helped me to roughly get back to the place where I stopped reading. If I had time, I took links with the exact posting number, there is a link at the top of every post in the old forum that gives you the direct link to the posting. The new forum has the same feature: In the top right corner of each posting is the time since the post was made, it’s a link to this post. Unfortunately I have noticed that on all my computers (always using the latest Firefox, currently 82.0.3, on Windows) the links in the new forum do ot work accurately (I often end up off by several posts, sometimes too old, sometimes too new), while on the old forum this worked perfectly.

I also work with browser sessions, meaning my most used topics are always opened automatically. There, again, the new forum has issues restoring the tab to the correct place in the thread, while the old forum did that very precisely.

One nice thing I noticed is that while scrolling, the URL in the browser’s address bar changes as you scroll to always show the direct post link to what you are watching. This post number is the last part of the URL, e.g. here I right now see 11591/5, the 5 is the post number. That makes it very easy to create a batch of bookmaks of all my open tabs with info where I am in all the topics to carry over to the next computer I need to use. Now that is a very useful feature for me! In the old forum I would only get tabs with the topics at the first post of a page. Unfortunately, as said above, the display accuracy of these post links is not very good, but still better than just getting to the start of the correct page.

This new forum remembers where you stopped reading in any topic (and across all devices), so there is no need for bookmarks in this specific case. (But of course if you want to bookmark a specific post for other reasons).

1 Like