Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

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I'm currently working on next iteration of my own forum software that I am using to run private forum about classic space games and I am now torn between traditional and "infinite scrolling". I've got a prototype that was infinite scroll but I've moved it back to paginated. I also have simple categories structure but I am considering going back to classic one where there was category that stored forums which in turn stored threads.

When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.

Link to prototype for interested: https://v4.misago-project.org/ Source: https://github.com/rafalp/misago-local-dev

Infinite scrolling — can be annoying, I think, especially when trying to scroll down and click some footer links. Meetup .com recently made that impossible: When moving the mouse down towards the footer, instead they did more infinite scrolling, pushing the footer downwards even further, making it impossible to click. (Seems they've fixed this now)

There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.

> classic one where there was category that stored forums

Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).

> Link to prototype

Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing

What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?

> Forums inside categories?

Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.

> What made you start the project?

I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!

I personally hate infinite scrolling and would choose pagination over it for most things. Infinite scroll is essentially just pagination but with auto-loading the next page, without numbering...

Please try accessing that prototype with JavaScript disabled, and see why I feel this is also the wrong approach for the successor to classic forums.

Just put the web page content onto the web page. Nobody ever died by doing that.

I am aware how it looks like with JS off, but I'm not doing anything here that Discourse haven't done and they had massive success doing so, so I'm going to stick to it. :)

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