New forum: Thank you (+ a couple of feature requests...)

Great job with new community portal!

But I need help already. :) I changed profile username and then also email in profile settings and from that time, It seems that there exists two versions of my profiles: 

• this one - to which I still can login with old credentials - https://ciq.forums.garmin.com/members/ef464bd22b7a4fa486d7abf2dae1b2a3
• the right one with all my posts to which I am not able to login after change - https://ciq.forums.garmin.com/members/capinoha 
  
  • I tried to generate forgotten password message for the new mail but didn't get any

Can somebody please take a look on this? Thanks!

Love the awesome new forum, well done! (And it lets me stay logged in! Happy days! )

It's looking good!  

I wanted to try an image - it works great!

Quite liked the old format APART from the fact it kept logging you out for no good reason. Let's see how this one does. But we NEED pages.

Can you articulate why pages are necessary?

I've ping'd Former Member to look into this.

I'd liked a paged navigation too, primarily to make it easy to jump to the last post in the thread. (I'm not interested in the old posts as I've read all that already lol)

A workaround is to click on "newest"  just below the first post, (but it defaults back to oldest every time it seems)

In my opinion, pages are helpful for navigating very long threads (assuming you are interested in past content). Infinite scrolling is just too slow if you want to jump somewhere in the middle of a thread. I've already given the example of The Daily WTF forums above, which is a community of coders and/or technically-minded people, where a switch was made to infinite scrolling and most people protested, so pagination was implemented while retaining all the other modern features.

I have a couple of threads with hundreds of posts. In the past, if I wanted to jump somewhere in the middle or to an approximate date, it was fairly easy to do so with pages. I realize that this method of navigation is somewhat random, but it's something that is impossible with infinite scrolling.

I realize it's a minority opinion, especially in 2019. I think most people like scrolling because it's simple and intuitive (especially for mobile), and most people ignore the downsides of scrolling because they usually don't deal with lots of pages or feel the need to scroll that far back.

I do think the ability to search a specific thread would mitigate this somewhat.

Here's a couple of links on the subject:

- Telligent Community user request asking for a return to pagination (I believe these forums use Telligent now): https://community.telligent.com/community/i/ideas_and_improvements/bring-back-pagination-on-forum-thread-list

- A blog post on infinite scrolling on Twitter, from a couple of years ago (that I can't find now), which makes the analogy between physical scrolls and paper books. Paginated books are preferred to scrolls in the real world, but ironically on the internet we all prefer scrolling (which is very inconvenient in the real world). Pages allow us to quickly "flip through" a book to find what we are looking for, which would be very hard with a physical scroll.

Here's a post from 2018 that makes the same point: https://medium.com/@fkadev/stop-building-websites-with-infinite-scroll-2fcd6d4bed86

It also makes the point that infinite scrolling means you can't see "where you are" and it's impossible to return to your previous position once you lose your place. (e.g. What if you close your mobile browser and when you re-open it, the page refreshes?)

For balance, here is a post which makes the point users overwhelming prefer scrolling (but also lists the pros and cons of infinite scrolling vs pagination): https://medium.com/ashleycrutcher/scrolling-vs-paging-2e952fb39459
(None of the use cases she mentioned involves forums with threads that could have hundreds of posts, tho. I realize it's not the kind of thing that most users deal with in 2019.)

I realize that most "normal" users overwhelming prefer scrolling, for many legitimate reasons. But I would argue that this is because the #1 form of content on the internet is social media, where anything older than a few days is completely irrelevant. For example, reddit is often held as an example of a modern type of forum, yet many will agree that reddit is very poor for archiving and looking up old information/discussions.

TL;DR

Infinite Scrolling:

• Simple and intuitive
• Gives user no sense of where they are or how much content there is
• Scrolling through long content is very tedious
• Hard to return to previous position
• Great for short content or when you are not interested in older content within a long list

Pagination:

• Clunky and "old"
• Quick access to any point in a long discussion
• Page number gives a definite sense of "position" within content
• Very easy to return to where you were 
• Works well with long threads where you are interested in older content

From the thread list, you can also click on the "Latest" post link (*), which shows the latest post as well as some of the earliest posts.

(*) Somewhat ironically, clicking on "Latest" itself doesn't work -- you have to click on the time following "Latest".