I think Infinite Scrolling (the current system) is not a good idea, because it increases the page memory with each load at the bottom of the page and it could lead to browser crashes.
Another disadvantage of Infinite Scrolling is that you can’t reference an specific part of the post stream by URL, so you can’t bookmark it (a big disadvantage of AJAX)
Well, bookmarking an specific page number is not really want I want (it doesn’t make sense hehe). But I refer that if I want to jump to the page number 23, it’s very annoying to go through page number 1,2,3,4… and so on loading with infinite scrolling until I reach the page number 23. Do you understand me? The infinite scrolling wastes more time and memory (and could crash your browser when loading too much pages).
Personally I think that message filtering would be a more effective and useful way of quickly getting to past content. You know that the post you want to find was posted by Jenny? Filter to see just posts made by Jenny (which you can already do by viewing her profile page). You know the post you want contained a particular word (or tag)? Filter by that word or tag.
Go going back a particular ‘distance’ through your discussions, I’d suggest that an option to ‘jump to n days ago’ (or to a particular date and time) would be more useful than jumping to a particular page, because how would you know which page a post was on? And if it was on page 23 yesterday, it’s probably on page 27, or maybe 30, now. Far easier to remember when it was you first saw it and jump back to that time.
I agree that it should be made more easy to navigate your stream, but I don’t think that pagination of the stream is going to be the best, or even a particularly good, means of doing this.
I love the infinite scrolling - BUT I hate pressing back after viewing a single post and ending back up at the start after scrolling for ages
One could work around this by setting some variable when the user leaves the stream, and when coming back via the back button, load the stream from there - it would be possible in backbone. But it would also require scrolling and loading of posts upwards - though that is needed if we ever implement live streaming anyway.
Yes, a ‘return to previous place in stream’ function would be fantastic when leaving the stream to view single posts. I guess in that case, the post GUID is known, so it should be possible to load the stream from that post.
@goob
I like your idea of using a date filter. Adding a datetime picker (there’s a lot of javascript libraries for that) to easily filter by a specific date or interval of dates.
I’ve noticed that the mobile version uses a GET parameter called max_time (I think it is a timestamp) for pagination, but in the desktop version it doesn’t work
I will vote up for pagination. Even if the content on pages will be different every time. I will at least know how much before the exact post was posted. That will make easier to reach that particular page( or near to that page ). That will make finding content easier.