The discussion revolves around an issue where refreshing a page after opening a specific post causes the browser to center and highlight a different post, often moving backward through the thread. FichteFoll explains the behavior, noting that the URL changes to reflect the previous post, and questions why the system doesn’t maintain focus on the originally linked post. riking clarifies that the URL is based on the top of the browser view, while read state is tracked by the bottom, and a recent change caused the page to scroll to the linked post upon entry. FichteFoll suggests a solution: base the URL on the post currently in the center of the viewport, which would better align with user focus and improve consistency.
I’m not sure if this is a FireFox-only issue and I doubt it, but the procedure is as follows:
Open a page at a specific post (hotlink, permalink whatever)
The post is vertically centered and highlighted with the (new) blue color.
Refresh the site.
The page now centers the previous post and highlights that. You can notice how the url changed to .../1/4.
Repeat until you reached the original post of the thread.
I can understand why this is happening and I also understand that it is hard to track which post I am actually reading, but in the described scenario this should not happen.
My use case that led to this discovery:
I opened a few posts that I wanted to read later in multiple tabs. I then wanted to reply to those but since I didn’t have an account on the site yet I had to create one. Hence, I had to refresh all the tabs I opened and suddenly was wondering why I opened them in the first place because I could not remember why I would open the exact posts the view was focussed on.
We have this weird situation where the page URL is based on the top of your browser and read state is based on the bottom of your browser.
A change that I made recently made you enter the topic with the post you were linked to scrolled down 20%, which combined with the fact that the URL is based on the top, causes the “moving up” behavior that you describe.
I also get a bit annoyed with the read tracking at times, but I have no clue how to fix it.
How about basing the URL on the post that currently takes the middle of the page? I mean the post that the vertical pixels at client.size / 2 belong to. Usually you should be focussing on the middle of the page, and even if not since opening the url will center the posts we can assure the page opens roughly at the same place where the reader left. (It also makes hotlinking a post easier because I can use ctrl+l to focus the location bar and just need to copy, compared to locating the post’s timestamp, clicking and then copying.
I believe that the same attempt could be used for this problem.
