I’m not familiar with existing studies on this area, but it’s certainly a well-know fact that your shouldn’t put a footer on your infinite scrolling website. There are many popular examples here, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, GMail, etc. None of those have footers, and all the web application functionality is available as they are used by billions.
That is not in our roadmap, and I’m not aware of any of our existing paying customers asking for something like this.
So, if I got the whole history right, your problem is that:
- Your main property website has a footer
- You want your main property and your Discourse instance to look familiar
- Discourse won’t have a pro-eminent footer on some pages, as they infinite scroll the footer away.
- You don’t want to have the footer on just some pages
I understand that it’s a complicated position, but being stoic about it you have only two options if you want to use Discourse:
-
Put the footer.
Use a page without infinite scrolling as the home page, like Categories - Discourse Meta, so it is featured prominently and don’t fret about it being out of reach in the/latestroute. -
Don’t put the footer.
Our discourse.org page has a footer, and so does our blog. But we don’t have the same footer here. Many companies do the same, and doing the opposite may be just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.