Hi. I donât think this has been discussed before, and I believe the issue is due to the updating of the browser history/URL while scrolling on the post pages.
If you take your time to read each post, you wonât notice it, but if you scroll a bit too fast, the browser takes you back to a previous reply. This makes it very hard to browse the replies. I havenât tested it in browsers other than the latest Firefox.
Is anyone else experiencing this? It would be great to have a user setting to disable this behaviour.
I think, this plugin mentioned on the Discourse Meta forums gives the user the option to disable it. I donât know what side effects it could have, but would the administrators be interested in installing that plug-in?
There are shortcuts to navigate the posts, I know. But it is very annoying to have your scrolling functionality hijacked.
I think this might be a regression as of Discourse 3.3. Discourse used to be very bad about jumping around as you scroll, especially on mobile devices, but they all but fixed the issue sometime last year. It feels just like what I was seeing before; it didnât happen until the last month or so. I hadnât drawn the connection to browser history though. (Iâm also using Firefox.)
Might be, but I am sure I have been seeing this issue for more than a year now.
To be honest, Discourse is my least favourite forum software, and issues like this makes me avoid using it. Unfortunately, it is very popular, and the choice of software for our community. At least we can improve it for all. This issue is bad UX.
If you try it in a long thread, you can observe the URL being updated, appending the post number/ID to the URL. If you scroll fast, it falls behind, so when it comes to updating the viewed content, it takes you back to the latest post referenced in the URL.