Another Website Out Smarts Itself

Discourse is everything that is wrong with modern forums. It starts with the endless scroll. What a pointless fad that is for most things, including forums. My experience with this endless scroll stuff is that it is just no good for browsing through the forums. The reloading of the next batch eventually slows down and gets inconsistent. Not only that, but if you leave the page, it doesn’t remember where you were .

My real gripe that I noticed yesterday is that I was on my tablet typing something in the search box to search the forums. With every character I typed I guess it sends a search to the server to return suggestions. Sure, that could be handy if searching hadn’t gotten so awful in general. Thank God for Kagi. I truly do appreciate its good search results. That search engine generally gives me relevant search results, unlike Google.

It turns out that each poll to the server counts as a search, and searches seem to be limited based on rate. When I fully entered my terms, I hit search, and it told me I had searched too many times and that I needed to wait. Fortunately, the next try worked, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it.

Discourse is a perfect example of modern web stuff. Things are made worse and less efficient yet pushed as modern and better.