The discussion revolves around the lack of a topic browsing slider on Discourse’s topic pages, similar to the one available for replies. timhogan highlights the need for such a feature, especially on large forums like LostArk, where users may want to quickly navigate through thousands of topics. While JimPas notes that a slider exists on the topics page and mentions keyboard shortcuts, Jonathan5 clarifies that the original poster is referring to the topic listing pages, such as category pages, where no such slider exists. timhogan emphasizes the importance of easy topic browsing for user engagement, comparing it to navigating physical libraries. sam acknowledges the complexity of implementing such a feature, particularly due to the dynamic nature of the /latest page, but suggests that a slider could be feasible for stable orderings like created in ascending order. He also proposes that better tagging systems could help manage large topic lists more effectively. No such feature currently exists, but it’s seen as a potentially valuable addition for high-traffic communities.
For easy topic replies reviewing there is the great right side “slider” - image bottom. Quick and painless. For the topic page I did not see the same slider?
Like LostArk (great, huge site) and others, many people will want easy “topic browsing” through perhaps 30 days (perhaps 3000) or more. 3000 topics at LostArk is too difficult to reach without something like the reply slider. Many people will think 30 days or more is old news but still around 30 days is relatively “fresh”.
Besides topic slowly scrolling down the side to find the 3000th topic in Discourse, is there a quicker method? The date schedule at the search control window is possible for topics browsing but much cumbersome compared to the “perfect” replies slider shown below.
The main point is - very easy sliding down on topics “enables” users to find more important information. They might find more users creating more topics.
By “topic pages” the original poster means the pages which list topics, eg on a category page. I don’t think there is a slider like this, though it might be nice to have.
Users will occasionally use the search control like forum “historians”. 99% non historians won’t check more than a few pages of topics using the slider. So at LostArk and other very busy forums almost everybody won’t check topics older than a few days of news. But then very few Discourse forums are as big as LostArk. Non paginated forums always have right lower page numbers to allow really easy chunks of topics to review but still they most won’t check to say 200 topics.
Without a topic slider like the reply slider has, its like not being able to browse forum topics - like not being able to browse books walking easily down the corridors in “real” libraries - with or without categories! So for forums that have many important (to their users) topics there would have major benefit.
At least that way the order is somewhat stable … and if you were last at topic 9783 of 109737, you could quickly scroll to 9783 again and continue your journey when there are 120333 topics.
Nothing like this exists yet though, but it is certainly an interesting idea for extremely high scale communities.
One interesting thing that could help is more liberal use of tagging, that way maybe lists can be a bit more manageable if the tagging structure is rich enough.
