But there is no “rebuild the HTML” option at “…”.
Many site switched to this software (forgot its name) and I actually never got really used to it. The design tries to be so subtle that it makes it hard read and navigate.
What really throws me off is the lack of pagination everywhere.
This and many other sites are based on markdown and HTML, neither of which have a page concept.
Familiarity aside, coming from the point of view of moderation and thread management, I’m happy to see pagination gone. It becomes a problem whenever a thread is so long that the official or most informative answers become buried in a way nobody ever sees them again, and long ongoing threads just turn into circular routines of people coming in and asking the same old questions over and over, and us having to link to the key responses over and over. I can hardly blame anyone for contributing to that problem, because when you have a thread that is 48 pages long, who is going to trundle all of that?
It’s true that long threads in general will always suffer that problem, but when you can just scroll through a conversation freely, the barrier is quite a bit less than loading 48 different web pages. Plus, you can much more easily filter by staff responses in the new forum. Try it here, click on the “May 18” link at the top of the timeline to get back to the top, then click on my avatar in the list of contributors. A flash card will pop up, and in the corner you can click a link showing my posts—and there you go, all of the official responses in one tidy list.
Goodness me. Pure sorcery
Honestly I can see this being a problem even without pagination. When a thread gets really long like this one, who’s going to read all 100+ responses before commenting?
Oh sure, there is always going to be a cap on usefulness once a thread gets beyond the point of what anyone will want to read through. My point though is that for most threads, hiding responses is worse for discovering good answers than having to scroll through them. If an answer is important, and we do want it to stick out, we can highlight it to help facilitate that—like I’ve done with this one.
Yeah that makes sense. May be the reason why sites like Reddit never have done pagination.
I know it’s not likely but have to ask––are there any forum software add-ons available that enable users to opt for a traditional experience (such as pagination)?
Edit to update:
Unless I’ve missed something in my search, no need to answer my question. Sorry for taking up space/time. I’ve found discussions in which at least one Discourse developer participated. Pagination is in fundamental opposition to the Discourse philosophy, it seems.
I’m not often here, and today is my first experience with the “new” forum. I love it. I needed an answer I could not find in the manual, gritted my teeth and searched the forum. First hit was exactly what I needed. At the very least, the search function works well. This has not been my experience with most user forums!