First I want to say that I really enjoy the forum here and this is by no means an attack or something like that. But there is just one major thing that bugs me: posts not being searchable with the browser.
Sometimes there is the case that I’m searching for something and I already know the thread it was in but don’t know how it was exactly formulated or what key words where used. Normally I would just do a Ctrl+f and searching through the page, retyping the query if necessary when it was written differently than I remembered.
But this unfortunately isn’t possible on Ziggit because everything gets loaded as needed. This lazy loading and unloading unfortunately goes so far that it removes the replies that are out of the viewport. So I can’t even use the[1] trick to scroll through the post and search afterwards. Though teasingly, and making it even more frustrating, everything stays cached in the browser, just not rendered…
I know that the site itself has the functionality for searching also within a post. But this isn’t as quick or seamless as doing it in the browser. Especially for repeated queries where I can’t remember the exact wording.
I also know that it runs on Discourse so this isn’t the fault of the mods. I, forgive my ignorance, haven’t looked if it would be possible to configure this someway to make it better.
I also think that it isn’t that much of a problem for the small threads which are quite common. But for larger ones that are also an active discussion where you need to refer to past things, like this which finally prompted me to write this.
I am not sure if you know that there is a good way to search within a topic.
While viewing the topic, press / to activate the search box, then press the down arrow key and enter to select “in this topic”. Finally, enter your search term and press enter.
Thanks I didn’t know that and having Vimium enabled also didn’t help with finding that.
Though I still find it somewhat unsatisfactory for a few reasons. First the unneeded extra clicks. Second because it doesn’t highlight results within words. So I if I search thread it will highlight a literal thread but not the part in multithreaded. And third because I get a very narrow context around the result. This wouldn’t be a problem if the viewport scrolled to the part in question.
I just want to say that I agree, I hate aggressive lazy loading/unloading too. The search box is a terrible workaround to an issue that shouldn’t exist, and probably costs more bandwidth than the lazy loading saves. (edit: although I appreciate that you were probably just trying to help, not defending the design decision)
I’m just so defeatist that I always expect web tech to be garbage, and I’m never disappointed.