The discussion revolves around improving mobile navigation in a forum topic. Ellibereth suggests implementing a feature similar to “Replies to” on desktop, citing difficulties in navigating back to the original post after reading a reply. sam proposes a “collapsing the stream” approach, where the posts between the original and the reply are hidden and can be expanded later. codinghorror mentions that a BACK button appears when scrolling up, but this isn’t obvious. Ellibereth provides screenshots to demonstrate the issue. Ellibereth expresses interest in sam’s idea, hoping it could also help with implementing user filters on mobile.
On mobile when you tap the the avatar and arrow at the upper right of a post to read the post someone is replying to - there’s no easy way (that I can find) to navigate to the post you were originally at - I’ve had to just scroll back down.
I can see how the full “Replies to” dropdown like on the desktop can be hard to make look good on mobile. Perhaps there could be a button that takes you back to the post you were previously at before making a jump in a topic or even just a way to go back to the original post after seeing what post they were replying to.
I experimented a few years back with “collapsing the stream” between the two posts. I think this works well on mobile. Cause it is easy to expand the stuff in the middle after you click it.
If you are scrollling up ↑, you can, because the big blue BACK button will appear above the topic progress bar. If you are scrolling down ↓ deeper in the topic you are pushing your read point further down so that’s irrevocable.
Seeing how it’s done on mobile would also help me with some other stuff…I’ve been trying on and off to get that same effect onto mobile mode, but with the user filter.
