When threads get long they struggle to load, and especially when there are lots of images.
The Vigilant Citizen forums have got it right.
Frustrated!!
It’s just a matter of taste. To me, pagination is a pain in the neck. I like Discourse’s infinite scrolling and the slidey navigation thing. Your answers are maybe to use a faster server, or just use XenForo 
4 Likes
Understood, thank-you.
1 Like
There are a lot of discussions about the pro/con of pagination vs infinite scrolling on the internet.
You may dislike the infinite scrolling, but since Discourse’s navigation was built around it, it works very well thanks to the timeline to the right, the fact that the browser remembers which post you were at when you left the thread when you come back later, etc… Also, some people won’t like it until they give it a bit of time to give it a try.
Also, I’ve migrated 3 forums from old forums with paginations to Discourse. The extremely rare complaints about the lack of pagination quickly vanished. People ended by liking it.
5 Likes
Thank-you.
have been using it for more than a year and the delayed response is frustrating to say the last.
Otherwise everything else is fine.
Can you say more about the delayed response? In which context exactly? On which forum?
1 Like
There doesn’t seem to be an efficient importer from Discourse to Xenforo? Pity.
That might be a sign that not many people are doing it. Though it might just be complicated…
You’d have to ask on Xenforo’s forums for this, but a quick google search led to what you’re looking for (the first result…).
About the delayed response, it might be a performance issue related to your server’s specs, as @Jonathan5 said previously.
2 Likes
This is untrue, as we only load a “virtual” page at the time on topics, which is just 20 posts long, no matter the size of the topic.
That means that loading this topic here with a handful of replies and loading Events Plugin 📆 with hundreds of posts takes the same time. Just tested on my browser and timings are similar.
Do you see anything different?
6 Likes
Thank-you, understood. Have also just had some feedback on my hardware configuration, which could be the issue.
2 Likes
Inifinite scrolling is forced “binge-watching” where as pagination is “episode watching”. But you are right it is total pain especially when jumping to the last post of an exceedingly long list of replies and one has to wait for all of them to be marked as “read”.
1 Like
That’s not quite accurate. If you’re in a topic with 5,000 posts and click the end date on the timeline (or any other method of jumping to the end other than scrolling) you don’t actually load every post in-between. “Pages” of replies are loaded in/out behind the scenes, so if you skip to the end only the most recent batch of posts load.
If you start reading and come back later, your position is saved too… so you shouldn’t need to “binge” an entire topic any differently than with paginated forums.
7 Likes
Typically I jump to the end to clear the topic and its replies from an “Unseen” list with no intention of ever returning to it.
1 Like
I disagree, I think infinite scrolling is one of the nice features of Discourse. When I use other software that doesn’t have infinite scrolling I find it super annoying. I’ve heavily used Discourse for over 5 years now and I don’t ever recall significant loading delays, even when a thread has hundreds of posts.
4 Likes
You’re going to get delays scrolling the page through hundreds of posts, as each set of 20 pages loads, but using the slider (whatever it’s called) gets round that and is at least as easy as pagination.
1 Like
When I did my last migration, one of the admins had a quick review of a long-time phpBB user. This one said that he didn’t like the infinite scrolling because contrary to the pagination, you never knew where you were in a thread.
I replied that it was the exact opposite. With the phpBB pagination, there is confusion, because the number of messages per page can be changed by every user in their preferences. And the only way to communicate about a specific part of the discussion is by relying on pages: “look at page 30…” where there are xx messages.
We can dislike the infinite scrolling by design, but the interactive timeline in Discourse is so well-designed that we know exactly where we are at any time. It’s more effective in practice than pagination while being way more precise.
People just need to give it a try (I mean, a real, serious try) before expressing an opinion.
But, of course, some -rare I suppose- won’t like it no matter what.
5 Likes
My one very minor gripe is needing to drag in order to get that precision for navigating, i.e. not being able to hover somewhere in the slider and see the post number before I click. It’s extremely rare that I want to go to a specific post without already having a link directly to it though, so really not a big deal.
2 Likes
“Interactive timeline” is better than “slidey navigation thing”
If it already gets posts in chunks of 20 you’d imagine a plugin could add page numbers to it!
I can’t imagine Topic List Previews Theme Component with pagination! 
@DGForum if you need a demo of how fast data can load, take a look at my site which is above basic spec: StarZen: The Unofficial Star Citizen Community:
Scroll down and see how quickly things are loaded (assuming you have good connection). Note how it is image heavy so first time may be a little slower. Once images are cached after first visit, it is very fast.
2 Likes