I hate them. I scroll down, The page increases in length and I have to work out where I was looking at. I find it makes viewing content far more confusing and difficult.
I can’t be the only one who finds them irritating? I hope they are a fad.
Can you still do polls on Sitepoint? It would be interesting to do one on this.
Yes, you can do polls. I did one a few weeks ago, and already forgot how to do it. But the instructions should be in the FAQs, I think. (@RyanReese beat me to the punch.)
For the most part, yes, I agree, the never-ending scroll can be a huge nuisance, sometimes. Blame Facebook. I think they were one of the first to do that.
Yes, you can do polls. You have to create them when you create the topic though. Unless it has changed in the new version of Discourse.
Regarding endless scrolling, it has its place but it has to be used wisely. I used to hate it but now, not so much.
It is good in FB unless you want to click one of the links at the bottom because they keep on disappearing. Which makes me wonder who thought about adding any links at a footer that keeps on moving all the time. Not very wise.
Discourse also uses endless scrolling but it does remember what you’ve read so you don’t have to scroll to that particular post.
For me it depends on the type of application. I love the Discourse format, for example, but I dislike some other forms of long-form-instead-of-paginated content pages
Yep, the new poll system is FAR better than what Discourse had previously. It is a very well designed implementation. Has a few quirks that are fixed upstream, but we don’t have them yet, but they are edge cases.
Yes, but it still would look like somoene thinks that it is dependant on content and some think that it depends on implementation. But it is both. Endless scrolling is not always suitable, and sometimes it comes handy.
Infinite Scroll is a horrible practice. I like it to an extent, but it needs to stop at some point and become paginated.
I think YouTube’s “More” is the most annoying implementation I’ve seen though. It combines the worst of both. The clicking & waiting of pagination and the infinitely long page of infinite scrolling.
+1 for finding it annoying. What is even more annoying for me is combining it with google images… so i search for an image and scroll down and down and down … it keeps on loading new pages… down further. Oh not finding what i want. Scroll up scroll up scroll up scroll up scroll up scroll up … ah there is the search box again. Why oh why don’t they have it so the search box is fixed! or so it detects if you are moving up and shows a the search box again.
Add my name to the petition to stop eternal scroll. You can add to that most fixed-length pages that progressively load content on request via Ajax.
Why don’t I like it? Principally because it causes my computer to run slowly when loading lots of additional content via Ajax, and because when I click a link and then hit the back button, on most sites it takes me back to the initial page state rather than the last known state. It is often harder to link to a particular point or state.
I find Discourse is the only good implementation of this principle that I have come across – because the URL updates as you scroll through, enabling each page state to be considered separately, so you can link to individual posts, it allows you to go back to a point on the page, and it loads from the desired point outwards rather than from the top.