So, the sitemap takes care of web crawler searchability. What about users? In threadview you have the scroller widget on the right to quickly navigate through posts. What about categories, how can you scrub through older parts of the category. I guess this comes down to the fundamental design choice of infinite scroll: you emphasize recent content and make it mobile scroll friendly, but it is not feasible to scrub through thousands of posts and also impossible to return back to a position in a long list. What strategies are you using, if any? At the moment, I’m considering tagging and clustering - perhaps using AI to cluster/tag topics and then creating wiki pages to list topic in some kind of wikitree structure. This can present the user with a full overview of the content available. I’m wondering if someone has already tackled this and found a good solution? Obviously search is one option with the caveat that this only works for users to know what they want and doesn’t help browsability. The search itself suffers from the same infinite scroll problem - but that is a separate topic on how to improve search.

That’s why we have search and tags. I don’t see any issues here. Random bumping adds just noise.

Yes, I’m leaning towards tagging and creating indexes/table of contents. I wonder if there are also other options that I have missed.

If your forum is community info centric or otherwise. If your self hosted or the plan your own has the Docs Plugin can be good for quick organized searches. In my instance I created a guide category with Tags and set this category viewable by all but only maintainers group can create edit content there. I use Tables as first post to act as a quick look at topics that are posts. At the bottom of post a link to source. There are some good advanced search features like date range, search by poster, tag, date range, category. Iirc the Saved Searches Plugin might also be a consideration.

Easy ways to navigate and browse large categories?

Product Support

Isambard (Isambard) June 2, 2024, 7:06am 5

Exactly, the forum is info-centric which is maybe why more relevant than more discussion oriented forums. I will check out the things you metnioned. Thanks!

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Easy ways to navigate and browse large categories?

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