Bring back the old version PLEASE.

I’m sure there are others like me who would like to help you stay rather than see you go.
How about your own thread where you post something about the info you’re looking for, no matter how vague, so i/we can help you find it?

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Ah ok. Just need some getting used to. I am sure you had your reasons. I truly love this forum and would never leave, although my wallet would appreciate lol! Thank you for everything.

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Thanks so much for saying so! Glad to have you here.

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At the end of the thread there is a drop down box. Change that to “Tracking”. Then next time you log on it will show you the number of new post at the end of the Thread title. Click the number and you are where you left off. I can post a pic if that didn’t make sense.

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Same here - for me most significant change. Impossible to view old long threads quickly and noting/finding different points being discussed. And long threads are usually the good ones.

@sb56637 , thread pages not possible with this new software?

Nope.

Just to make sure, did everyone notice and try out the “post slider” (for lack of a better term) on a long thread?

I’m not just saying this as a new admin of a Discourse forum, but paged threads were really my least favorite aspect of the old forum or any other forum platform for that matter. The one in the screenshot above would have been 95 pages long, and to find anything specific you would still have to search within the thread (which this forum can do as well). If you actually wanted to read it chronologically from a certain point you would read 30 posts, reach the bottom, next > read 30 more, next > etc… And to actually find anything specific by just clicking back and forth you would have to jump multiples of 30 posts back and forth in time. Add to that the fact that the progression of most big threads is highly variable, with spurts of many posts close together, then a lull, then another surge; so knowing how many pages to skip to reach a point in time is totally unpredictable. With this new “post slider” bar you just slide it until you get to the date range you’re interested in, release it, and then start scrolling down, and it will infinitely scroll as far as you want to keep reading.

There was also a significant problem with thread continuity where the last post in a page tended to get ignored/buried (multiples of 30 in our case) when the next post appeared at the top of the next page. This was such a common phenomenon that other more advanced traditional forum platforms put a notice on the top of the next page to the effect of “JoeShmoe posted this in the previous post: Post summary…”.

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Absolutely. I find pagination arbitrary and unhelpful. Seems more like a familiarity due to previous technological limitations, rather than the result of good user interface design. In every forum or website I use, I have a habit of changing the posts/items per page to the maximum supported number, typically 100, to have the least amount of interruption. This adds the inconvenience of making comments like “see topic X on page Y” even more obscure.

The timeline or “post slider” seems unwieldy at first, but I think it is a vastly improved way of presenting a thread: chronological and sequential scrolling through posts with both the post number and date visible as the “scrollbar”.

Plus the browser’s Ctrl+F search has a chance at working on the whole thread at once if all posts are loaded, compared to having to Ctrl+F for each page of a 50+ page thread… the horror. Of course, it’s better to use a site’s own search function, and again that is also much better on the new forum, with more advanced searching parameters. It’s really no contest, but… it’s new and different.

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Yes. That works well for me. And as Phouton mentioned, pages are, IMO, just something that we are accustomed to. Even the e_book I am reading has me flipping pages, whereas the online newspapers I read present me with a page, long, short or medium, but a single page. And I like that. :grinning:

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Yep. Even playing the Devil’s advocate I would say that although the “post slider” could considered to be unwieldy, pagination is even more unwieldy, and worse still, unpredictable. There’s probably no really good way to handle some of the epic long threads we have here. (Congrats to everyone for creating those by the way!) But I’d say that at the very least the timeline slider is a significant improvement.

Right. And a little PSA about the in-thread search: the first Ctrl+F opens the Discourse search engine to search within the thread, and the second time Ctrl+F is pressed it opens the browser’s in-page search mechanism for all the loaded (visible) posts.

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I actually quite like the thread scrolling rather than threads split into pages. Takes a bit of getting used to, but overall an improvement.
The only thing I really miss is a signature block, as I used to link to my most recent reviews, which are now not visible to any user.

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I agree. I’ve gotten used to the thread scrolling and like it. I didn’t have a signature, but some users had very useful links in their signatures which would come in handy.

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I like signatures as well.
I’d like to at least have a couple of links in my signature.
I don’t think signatures are supported with the new forum software, though.

Hey Don,

Thank you for additional descriptions you added to post #103 above. You’re a good story teller! - JC

Hey @stephenk , how about using the Featured Topic option in your user profile for that? And/or you can also add multiple links to the “About me” section with the following format:
[Link text](https://budgetlightforum.com/whatever)

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Thanks for the info. I’ll have a look at that functionality. Thanks for all of your hard work on the migration.

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The “About Me” section in your profile can serve this function as can a the “Featured Topic”.

Yep, but I still prefer signatures. :+1:

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+1

Also want to know how many posts i have, can’t do a 10K giveaway if i don’t know when i hit 10K.
Though thats some ways off and by then things will have settled down for SB so i will ask then.

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@Bort the post count can be found on your profile summary page:

This can’t be right, i was over 9000 posts on the old forum