I may have missed it

[Tesha]

Is there a BACK button?

Or a previous or next option ?

That would be lovely,
Thanks

[EarlG]

1. On which page do you mean?

The vast majority of the time you'd just want to use your browser's Back button to go back a page...?

[Tesha]

2. I enjoy reading Greatest first

and I often go from one thread to the next. so a next/last button would be 'nice'

The browser back button works, but it sometimes wants me to confirm the move which is a pain.

I could use the breadcrumbs, which I just thought of - rambling thought with a usability focus.

Thanks for the update - you folks are amazing.

[EarlG]

3. Ah, okay

I see what you're saying about having a Next/Previous link that would allow you to page through the Greatest threads in order, but unfortunately I'm not sure how it would be implemented. Once you click through to a thread from the Greatest page, you're on a "thread page" -- but the page doesn't know where you've come from to get to it, if that makes sense.

Say you arrived at the thread page from Latest instead of Greatest -- if that were the case and you saw Next/Previous links, you'd assume that you were paging through Latest threads, not Greatest threads. Or if you arrived at the thread from a forum, you'd assume the links would page you through the forum in order.

So if we were to put Next/Previous links on a thread page, we'd have to also track where you came from to get to that page, so that we're not showing the wrong Next/Previous links. It gets quite complicated I'm afraid, with a lot of room for things to go wrong. So this is probably something we're not going to be able to do.

As for your browser "confirming" the move when you hit the Back button, I can explain this and potentially how to avoid it. This is actually to do with how browsers work, it's not something inherent to DU.

If you're on the Greatest page and you change the filter options at the top -- say you change the date range from 24 hours to 12 hours -- you're submitting data to the DU database to tell it you want to view the page differently. After that data is submitted, the Greatest page reloads with the new view that you've asked for.

But because that reloaded page is a response to the data you submitted, if you leave the page and then come back to it (by clicking the browser's Back button) the reloaded page will still expect to receive data. When it doesn't receive it, it will ask you if you want to submit the data again (that's the "Confirm Form Resubmission" page.)

There is a way to work around this -- if you change the filter on the Greatest page, then once the page reloads, just click the big Greatest Discussions page title one more time. This will load the page again, but this time it will be a "normal" page load, and not a form submission. So when you click to a thread and then click your browser's Back button, you won't get the "Confirm Form Resubmission" page.

[Tesha]

4. Great answers and very helpful.

Generally I understand the complex nature of DU, but not how incredibly complex it really is.
Thank you for the info - and for all the incredibly hard work that’s gone into this.