I have been messing about trying to get a different look to other sites and have built a Facebook style topic modal. It seems to load quicker for me and seems to be more fluent on desktop. What are your thoughts? Link to test is https://www.carptalk-online.co.uk/ (only works on Desktop)

nicely done! i quite like that even though i’m not a facebook user. you have a cool site. :star_struck: also, i didn’t realize carp can get so huge! :fishing_pole:

Very cool! have you tested it in topics with 20+ replies? that’s when we load more “pages” of posts on scroll and in my experience is one of the biggest complications with this sort of alternate view

No i’ll do this now and report back

Works fine - Testing 20 replies - #29 by Carper1 - CarpTalk - Carp Forum

I can see the page load like you say but it works as expected

The topic doesn’t show up in a modal when clicking the direct link. From the topic list, it works tho.

Yeah thats the next thing i need to look into but i have been pondering over this, does it matter? That’s the same as Facebook behaves, the direct link goes to the actual post, if clicked while browsing modal opens.

Nice concept, are you able to maintain a consistent connection with message bus for new messages while loading older messages?

Yes, because the modal loads the normal Discourse topic application inside an iframe rather than rendering a custom copy of the topic. The iframe establishes its own MessageBus connection and Discourse continues handling the post stream normally, including loading older posts and receiving newly pub…

Facebook-style Topic Modal - Is it better?

Development

Lilly (Lillian ) July 27, 2026, 1:28am 2

nicely done! i quite like that even though i’m not a facebook user. you have a cool site.

also, i didn’t realize carp can get so huge!

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Facebook-style Topic Modal - Is it better?

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