# The topic progress indicator

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148>\
**Category:** UX\
**Created:** [November 1, 2015, 2:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148 "2015-11-01T02:16:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![anon20391312](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/779978/32.png) [@anon20391312](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon20391312)\
**Post date:** [November 1, 2015, 2:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148/1 "2015-11-01T02:16:09Z")

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Let me start with saying that I quite like the infinite scrolling-mode. It’s easy to read through an entire discussion (yes, I sometimes do that) without having to click “Next page” even once. However, I do think there is some room for improvement to how the ‘progress’ is displayed to the end user.

To the bottom of the page you can find this widget, for which I think there is some room for improvement:  
 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/a/0/a0bc2780834e41df17e030c9a7c3162b1aea3f48.png)

I ran across a ddifferent forum software package, where they have also implemented the infinite scrolling feature. They have also created a topic progress tracker, but theirs somewhat resembles a more familiar concept: the scrollbar. Their implementation looks as follows:

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/1/e/1e70cd28fb9a5bfc5498c0b65cfd15436964c124.png)

[Go here](http://discuss.flarum.org/d/987-flarum-v0-1-0-beta-2-released) to give it a go. By grabbing the progress indicator and dragging it up or down, the forum scrolls up or down and loads the associated posts. Because of its vertical orientation, this feels liek a better combination of scrollbars and infinite scrolling than how Discourse currently handles it.

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [November 1, 2015, 4:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148/2 "2015-11-01T04:16:21Z")

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Yes, this is listed on the 1.5 plan if you visit the releases category. I have never been happy with the right gutter in general so there are changes coming in that area.

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [May 19, 2016, 2:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148/3 "2016-05-19T02:38:33Z")

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Slipped to 1.6 but early version is now live.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [May 19, 2016, 2:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-topic-progress-indicator/35148/4 "2016-05-19T02:38:36Z")

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