Yes, Discourse put a lot of effort into it and it really shows. They didn’t just slap it in because it was the latest fad, they made sure the use of it was respected.
ping @system, @system, @neil, @system, @system (good job guys!)
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They put a hook on Ctrl-F too, so that it opens up their search window instead of your browser’s. Letting you search within a thread. (and of course it works really well, too)
That’s probably my most hated part of sites that ONLY have infinite scrolling. Especially Youtube that I mentioned above.
And it will only override the browser CTRL-F function if there are more than 1 page of posts, so you can use the native ability for short topics
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Well had to choose more annoying and difficult but really not so much.
What I hate is you see your scroll bar nearing the bottom of the page and you think ah almost to the end then the darn scroll moves upward and says gotya there is more and you thought you were nearly finished.
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Discourse is the best implementation of endless web pages I have seen. However I still find it more of a hindrance in my experience than a benefit. (no offence intended)
It is interesting that so far no one at all has voted in the poll to say they feel endless web pages make their experience easier and less confusing.
In addition, I think endless scrolling breaks one of the fundamental ideas of the web, because you can’t link to a page that contains relevant information if the content is endlessly changing.
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In addition, I think endless scrolling breaks one of the fundamental ideas of the web, because you can’t link to a page that contains relevant information if the content is endlessly changing.
Care to explain what you mean? The content of an “endless scroll” (I dislike this term, as they always end…) page isn’t constantly changing, just what you’re looking at at any one time. The content is still there.
And as stated above, in a good implementation, such as this one, you even have links to specific content at its position on the page (in this case, posts).
Even in Discourse, where you have a progress indicator, your URL changes as you scroll so, you have page state, and each post can still be linked to providing you a way to remember where you left off or to share a particular spot in the stream with others.
Outside of Discourse, I 100% agree. Almost no one else maintains state or provides a mechanism for you to share a spot in the stream with another person.
Yep, and I agree with the voted results. It will always be a bit more confusing than typical navigation, because we are accustom to typical navigation, it has been ingrained in us for years. However, if endless scrolling ever had a good implementation, it would be hard pressed not to look at Discourse as that good implementation. It is probably one of its strongest features.
I admit it does depend on the implementation of the endless page. But I think the concept is especially vulnerable to breaking the fundamental ideas of the web. Typically there is so much content that you are unlikely to get to the bottom of it. The content is presented in a great big ‘feed’ I suppose. It is typically not split into relevant sections that you can go to. This means you cant really write about something on another web page and link to the content on a page that has no bottom and is often updated so the content is not immediately available at the top by the time a reader clicks on the link. A link to a bottomless ‘feed’ page is OK if the context of the link is talking about the feed it’self, but if it is something in the feed, and there is no way of linking to that thing directly, then in my opinion it breaks the fundamental concept of the web interlinking information.
The web is supposed to be a tool for organising masses of tangled information into useful relationships. From my copy of “Weaving the Web” by Tim Berners-Lee, when talking about the idea behing the web and linking:
I wanted to continue to explore the ideas about connections that were evolving in my head. In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information really is defined by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything.
I admit it does depend on the implementation of the endless page.
I think that you and I and maybe from comments @cpradio are all on the same page there. If it’s done well/properly, it doesn’t break that at all. If it’s done poorly, as a lot of “endless page” designs are, then it’ could definitely be harmful.
I can’t remember the last time something, other than SitePoint Forums, that I actually used or cared about was done “endless page” style and was too long to easily reach the bottom of… long form pages, maybe, but nothing drastic. I’ll have to think about that and go check some out.
I find a lot of discussion/commenting systems are going this direction, as they either integrate Facebook comments, Disqus, etc. They may have a “load more”, but they present the same problem of not maintaining state. So you can’t send someone to the 3rd time you clicked “load more”.
I’ll have to try and pay more attention to as I see these.
Yeah, me too. Now that we’ve talked a lot about it I’d like to see if it’s more prevalent than I’d thought, and just creeping up on us like a lot of Internet changes do 
No, the content isn’t “there”. When you first load the page, you don’t get the full content, you get the initial state content before any additional Ajax calls are made. A common usage for eternal scroll is pages with user-generated content, such as comments pages on blogs and news sites, where each comment is given an id so that you can link directly to it with a #fragment link. Except that you can’t. Because when the page loads, that id doesn’t exist as part of the initial page content, so the fragment link won’t work.
I think one of the most annoying implementations I’ve seen recently is on the BBC website where it allows comments on articles. It’s generally agreed by everyone who uses the site that the new system is atrocious and not fit for purpose, but when has that ever mattered to an organisation… Anyway, what happens is this: it loads comments in batches of 20, starting with the most recent. So let’s say that you go to the page when 115 comments have been left, and you load the comments – it will show you #96–#115. You read those from #115 down to #96, and then click “Load more comments”. At this point, you would expect it to load #76–#95. But no. Because in the meantime, five more comments have been added, so when you request more comments, the website thinks "Aha, he wants the second batch of 20, which is #81–#100. So as you read through, it goes …102, 101, 100, 96, 98, 97, 96, 100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94… – and that is the absolute worst of all worlds.
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, comments on most news websites … we’re talking about major sites here!
The comments systems I feel like are a different thing than website content. You can feel free to disagree.
As is Facebook - I can still link to specific content items, but I can’t actually link someone to a spot in my feed anyway. I’m not exactly sure how that’s an example that’s relevant to this conversation. Could you explain?
No, the content isn’t “there”. When you first load the page, you don’t get the full content,
Sorry, this is a miscommunication. My point is that the content still exists; it’s still possible to implement some sort of anchoring or method by which to link to that content directly, if you desire. I don’t literally mean it’s all loaded in your browser window when you arrive at the page - merely that it still exists, and if the platform is well developed (such as Discourse is), accessible. If not… yeah. We get the mess that comes from poor design/development choices.
As I said, it isn’t always about linking to a point, often it’s about clicking a link and then hitting the ‘Back’ button, and then it’s bluddy annoying to go back to a different page state to the one you left.
But in terms of linking, a good example is Twitter Mobile. This has a traditional paginated setup with (I think) 30 tweets on a page. At the bottom, there’s a “Next page” link that takes you to the next page, but that is defined in absolute terms. So rather than the URL taking you to a page starting at tweet #31, it takes you to the tweet that was #31 at the time the link was generated, which means that you can copy that URL and it will always take you back to the same page, no matter how many more tweets have been added in the meantime.
As I said, it isn’t always about linking to a point, often it’s about clicking a link and then hitting the ‘Back’ button, and then it’s bluddy annoying to go back to a different page state to the one you left.
Unless we’re going to back-less browsers 
Yeah, I see what you mean though.
One continuous page for an article is prefect!
One never-ending webpage is horrible!
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I agree you can implement an endless page in a way that means you can link to content. But why bother using it at all, it seems to bring no real benefit, and extra problems. I really hope it is a fad that goes away.
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Actually to clarify, with regards to discourse, I don’t like the forums having the endless pages. Like with most endless pages, you get to the bottom and it loads more even if you are not interested in seeing more, and there is no (obvious?) way to control where you are in the list of threads. Other than the scroll bar which changes every time you get too close to the bottom. It makes browsing harder IMHO. 
But within a thread, it is quite good. All the comments are in order, relevant and linkable, and there is the little green bar at the bottom which gives you control on your location within the thread. Also there is a reachable bottom! I think for threads it makes browsing a bit easier than traditional methods. You can also link to any particular comment from another website. 
