Page 75 and Post 1,512 doesn’t provide any useful information actually. On the scrollbar, we provide a close estimate of the date for the nearest post which I think is much more valuable when scrolling through a topic.
Unfortunately I had to pull the plug
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I would like to say au contraire! Imo having someone say just look 2 pages back or the answer is on page 72, the third or fourth post is a misleading advice, since most of the paginated sites and forums will let the user customize how many posts per page are shown.
2 pages back @ 100 posts per page is totally not the same as 2 pages back when having 20.
I am 100% in favor of saying “post 6666” which can be interpreted as exactly/specifically that one post no matter what pagination or lack thereof is used. I have met this these stupid “situations” so many times (eg. on xda, snbforums, or ahk boards) and having in discourse only a single way to address the posts feels like a very big improvement.
The sidebar on the … side… helps with this navigation even more, as it’s so easy to search for the post i desire.
(i did give this advice, although maybe in a different form to multiple persons arguing that having infinite scroll is a stupid and bad idea, after asking them to look 2 a few pages back for something – i always use the highest number of posts per page, while most people don’t even know there’s a setting for that)
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I’ve been following this topic for days. Each time I return Discourse uses my read progress and brings me back to the post I last read. I can’t imagine anything easier that “takes care of it for you”.
The great news is that if the team finds something even more intuitive, they’ll probably implement it.
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Unfortunately I have been in the same boat. I had an old community which started in 1999. Started with BBForum software, then migrated to Vbulletin till it became too big to upgrade in a timely matter.
The Discourse team was incredible in their help of converting the forum from Vbulletin to Discourse. But once running, older forum users easily got annoyed, despite us pointing out the useful features of the software.
Even worse, revenue declined terribly, only 30% of ad revenue was left after the migration.
For a new community I would not hesitate to use Discourse, for an old community you should carefully consider whether Discourse would be a good fit.
Many people simply don’t like change and a forum is just a hobby for them, so they don’t want to spent much energy on learning new things. Others will embrace Discourse and never switch to anything else.
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I would be very interested to have a separate conversation about this, because I noticed the exact same thing. I have two websites, one Discourse and one WordPress. The RPM of my Discourse is also only 30% of what I see on WordPress. I’m not saying this is Discourse’s fault, but I’d like to look a little deeper into this with other Discourse admins, figure out which factors contribute to this, and see if we can find ways to improve that.
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Perhaps @neil can ping you about this? We are looking for sites to go in depth on this so we understand it.
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I’ve recently sold the site, so I can’t help much anymore. But I think it’s the combination of infinite scroll and the limited number of ad spots in the ad plugins.
With Vbulletin I knew all code pretty much by heart (as I know the infamous PHP/MySQL combination well). Discourse, being Ruby and Ember, appeared to be a too steep learning curve to get it right myself. I hope for OP (and others) that the team finds ways to increase revenue for everyone…
Could sidebars be marked with 4 divisions, no numbers, just a visual cue so people can see roughly where 25%, 50% is, especially on a topic that’s into the high thousands?
Or would this not be possible?
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I’m sure you could do something with CSS if you really wanted to add it to your site. I don’t think it would make a lot of sense for the majority of communities, because the percentage along the bar doesn’t necessarily translate to anything.
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I think we can do better than that if we’re going to start adding things to the timeline across all of Discourse.
Not a bad idea, to be clear, just a low bar if we’re going to be doing timeline improvements.
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I migrated from SMF to Discourse, I did had an ad revenue decline (and visits). But currently, after almost a year I’d say I’ve recovered all my revenue, my community is more active, specially for the improved performance on mobile.
I did the migration between February and March 2018, when the steep decline shows. From there, you can see an upward trend that hasn’t stopped.
The hardest part was the reindexing of all the topics back into Google.
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I can understand why would you want that? The (is it called timeline? i remember there was a “nomenclature” post somewhere, but i lost it 
) timeline is very easily usable right now. nothing is loaded as long as you keep it clicked (no needless resource usage), you have the back button easily reachable You have the date (in case someone says “March 1989”) Everything feels really nice and “at its place”. Adding the 25% markers would bring unnecessary noise.
Btw, @ staff, why did the “Back” button disappear at the end?
I don’t, apologies for not making that clearer, I was just wondering if 3 markings on the bar would be an easy way to make it feel more navigable for some people. It’s not a personal request though.
Nah, it’s my fault here, shouldn’t have said that YOU want it, i was talking generally, just that i used the bad addressing.
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The bigger problem is that if they were percentage based, the posts they took you to would constantly change. But they look like static references.
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Thanks for sharing your stats!
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With the support and input of @Merlls_Rizzini I have created this plugin which addresses some of this feedback, so now you have options and can happily adopt Discourse regardless of your views on quoting 
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That would be a cool plugin. If users could choose to add tags to their posts which would automatically be turned into a contents page at the top.
Or experienced users could tag the important posts as they go for the same purpose
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On the Tomnod forum we decided that topics with many replies be broken down by year… having the topic name preceded with the year. A couple have been broken down into “quarters” or every 3-months. This has made a big difference by not having to scroll forever and a day. In almost all cases, a reference link is inserted by the moderator back to the previous topic (with the same name but an earlier date. The "old"topic also has a link to the newer topic as the last entry, then that topic is closed. In 4 years no one has complained. Of course, a search query will point one to whichever “dated” topic(s) is/are relevant. Just one possibility to think about.
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How about considering the following : 1 more click = half a second to think before one writes, so that one has a tiny bit of time to make sure one is bringing value to the post one is reacting to?
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