tweak/forward_fill

Something that would be pretty great to have, I think, would be a "Forwardfill". Pretty regularly, I find myself in a thread with a few new posts that crossed over into a new page. Now, if I have started reading where I left off and my goal is to reply while seeing everything new for reference, I have to go to the new page and then backfill from there. It would be easier if I could just forwardfill from the second-to-last page. It would also be another visual indicator that there is another page after this one, which would be neat because I still sometimes reply to an old post because I didn't see there were new ones after that

That happens all the time. :(

If this forwardfill button is visible enough it should help prevent that.

Though, that assumes it only appears when there are new unread posts, and not when you are rereading page 2of4. I have occasionally wanted to see the next page's context as well (just like with backfill), but not often enough to have thought to ask for it for historical posts.

If we have forwardfill available for historical/read posts, maybe it can be highlighted differently when there are unread posts? We really should have some indication of a new unread page, this looks like a good place to put it. Just changing the highlight also results in a more consistent layout as the button is not coming and going.

(Possibly a better way to handle invisibility of new pages would be to slide the window of posts that are shown? If all the posts except the last two are already read, and one of those last two is on a new page, should we not push enough old ones off the top of the page and show all the new ones? Maybe we do this when players click a `?view=newPost#newPost` link and are wanting new posts? Though I think a sliding window is the way to go, if it is not too much work).)

It doesn't need to highlight unread posts any differently than read posts for it to solve that issue.

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If you're on the last page, you won't have the forward fill. If you're on what you think is the last page and you see the forwardfill, it will let you know that there's more

I meant the button would be highlighted to show there are unread posts on a new page. Different to what it normally looks like if you are on page two of four and want to forwardfill to add page three to the visible list.

This would make it more noticeable that here are more unread posts hiding on an unread page.
True, just like we don't see the backfill button on this page since it is the first page.

I don't know what that is.

Instead of a windows into the posts that paginates from post 1-20, then 21-40, it adjusts to show the relevant posts. This normally means it shows the last 20 (or whatever the pagination value is) rather than having one page with 21-40 and a separate page with 41 and 42 on their own.

I would rather see 23-42 (the end). Most of the time people don't care about the first posts on a page they are revisiting and probably don't care about losing sight of post 21 and 22.

Obviously this needs a little more fancy handling when there are lots of unread posts, but the backfill for context can even make a crude "start with the first unread post and paginate from there" work if we don't want to worry about deciding how many old-and-read posts to show.

I have just been bitten by this lack of visual information about new posts on a new page. :)
Responded to the last and 'latest' posts on the current page without noticing the story had moved on a bit in a new page.

I would really love some clearer visual indicator (and the ability to forwarfill the new posts into the current view). Anything better than having to manually parse [10 of 11] and '10 11 >' vs [11 of 11] and '11' with no '>'.

That's happened to me before too. I agree a more attention grabbing indicator would help avoid this. If a fill forward feature is made it would probably act as this indicator.

I'm not entirely sure what's being suggested. I understood BoS's initial suggestion, but this seems to be morphing into something else.

I am suggesting that, if we add a Forwardfill button, we make it very visible. That way it can also serve as a 'there are more posts ahead' warning.

But how would that stop cross-posting?

Not crossposting, but reaching the end of page 3, then making a post because you didn't notice there's already some stuff on page 4

I don't recall anyone mentioning cross-posting. But it would help there in the small case where the cross-post was a result of the poster not knowing there was already a reply?

Maybe we mean different things (or at least scales) by 'cross-post'? This is technically the same thing, but I don't consider it cross-posting when I come back hours later, read the updates, and reply... only to notice the next time I check that I missed a whole lot of posts at the top of the new page... ABOVE my post on that page, which makes them hard to notice.

As to how this would help:
Having a bit button that shows us, clearly, that there is another page of posts to read would reduce the chance of people no seeing them. Currently we click and it takes us to the latest unread post, if that is not also on the latest page, it looks a lot like we we have seen all there is.

I go swap tabs and refresh the page to see if someone has posted while I was writing (thank you bowl for the visual aids:), this avoids cross-posting, but does not help when there is an unseen new page involved.

After clicking it, the --load next-- link still shows, even when there are no more posts to load.

Clicking it again loads in the next page's posts again. making it look like it loaded more while it just duplicated them.

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It is not very visible, but I suppose that is a separate issue. I will probably style it brightly myself, even if it is ugly. Will let you know if I find an acceptably aesthetic way to make it stand out visibly, though it would be nice if it looked the way it does now when there are no unread posts on the new pages, and highlighted somehow when there are more that need to be read, but this can come later.

Yeah. That's weird. That's not happening on the test case that I was using, but I am seeing it on other threads.

It seems to not happen on threads where I in the 'game', only on public threads.

Yes. That's exactly it. I've updated the code and staging.

Working now. You also snuck a bit of progressive loading of more pages into there.

For visibility, and for now I am adding:

#forwardfill { color: orangered; }

The color is slightly off from what the site uses, but it looks better than:

#forwardfill {     
    color: #c54;
    font-weight: bold;
  }

which does not style it quite like the thread name links I was going for, and is a bit bright.

Just going with:

#forwardfill { color: #c54; }

might be acceptable too, but I would like it to stand out a bit from the other (Mark Unread/Quote/Edit/Delete) links down there.

I will run with it tampermonkeyed in and see how it looks after a while. Or I will play with more color options. Suggestions welcome.

I will a make a new thread for this and attache some screenshots when time permits.