This is all a bit peculiar since discourse, as a JavaScript app, excels at exactly this kind of spotty connection scenario. It is not sending whole web pages and assets over the wire, it is only requesting the minimal set of JSON data necessary to redraw the screen with JavaScript.
To be honest, we haven’t focused on it particularly because we are naturally very good at it by dint of our original design choices; it would be like asking a cheetah if it could please just run a tiny bit faster.
Anyway, we are mixing two requests here:
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Displaying “loading…” indicators for read-only display actions that could take a little while
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Confirming that saves happen for save write actions.
I’ve used Discourse a fair bit on smartphone with connections going in and out and I’ve never lost a reply. So that’s concerning, but we’d need a repro. With a bad enough connection anything is possible, so who knows.
Probably the best thing to do is focus on case #1, and identify places where we should show a loading spinner if the network is so slow and so unreliable that even getting a bit of JSON over the wire will take a while. These are surely much more common overall.