You still have to go through multiple pages in phpbb and similar old forum in long threads. Same issue, usually slower than scrolling down bring the apparent end of page in discourse
> You still have to go through multiple pages in phpbb and similar old forum in long threads.
Except for long threads the start of the thread is usually irrelevant beyond the first page or so (if even that) so you can just jump to a few pages from the end and go from there. Good forum software remains comfortable to use at million-post threads, and will render 100-post pages in a small fraction of a second.
IME discourse's "infinite loading" nonsense is just slow and a mess. Go check the Rust discourse's crate of the week thread, it is a slow mess to navigate, the browser's scrollback gets hopelessly lost, and of course the in-page search is broken.
That's a thread of a thousand comments, it's quite literally nothing, and for all that it completely fucks up your history to boot.
... because it's not possible to load the whole thread at once, so the normal scroll bar will be jumping up and down as you scroll to load content on demand. And really, if you want to jump to a particular post in a long thread, the special scroll bar is easier than pages anyways because it's continuous.
Really, the scroll bar IS a fresh take on the page list, except it's actually useful for navigating the thread and doesn't force readers to deal with the useless concept of numbered pages when such arbitrary divisions are no longer the primary way of navigating the thread. Once you choose to not implement explicit pages (and accept that it's not possible to load the whole thread in one request), the thread scroller is a natural consequence.
