Upgrading broke everything (on Vanilla forums)

[Bri]

Not on NodeBB, for vanilla forums

I actually stopped by because I had the unfortunate experience of having my server shut down (it was being hosted for free at my friend's domain services company, and that came to an end), so I had to find a new place and restore everything from backups. I'm on DigitalOcean now but as you might remember, I am using Vanilla Forums, which frustratingly has many plugins abandoned by their developers. I took this opportunity to upgrade for security updates, etc. but then it broke some key features I was using, and TBH I'm not so keen on learning PHP to fix it.

Which brings me here: I'm actually waiting patiently for this one feature: automatically scrolling to the last read post, that is saved across devices. I know I harped on this a long time ago, but I forget if it was a UX or performance decision.

Having experienced this pain really motivates me to port everything to this platform.

[psychobunny]

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that is something we don't save on localStorage, thus should work across all devices

EDIT: I think you should edit your title to include the software you're using

[PitaJ]

So do you want it to automatically scroll when you visit the topic, or after you click something else. Because there's a nice little alert that pops up when the topic is revisited that allows you to scroll back to your previous position.

[Bri]

That's the thing, I'm pretty sure that the popup you can click on is definitely something stored in local storage, I remember that that's how Baris implemented it, at least back then. Also, I can see that topics I've read are marked differently from topics I haven't read, but I'm still plopped right at the top of the thread.

The popup is an interesting idea, I can see where you'd like to see the topic beginning to get that context back, then scroll to see where the conversation left off; that's just not my use case, and I think @a_5mith and I are on the same page (see what I did there?) About not having to scroll through hundreds of posts to get where we left off.

This isn't really a complaint, more of a feature request, but mostly just an ask as to why the UX is the way it is. Is the vanilla forums platform the only one that does this?

[PitaJ]

If you want this that bad, I can make a quick plugin to do this. I don't think it would take very long.

I don't know whether the position is stored locally or remotely. However, either way, creating a plugin to do this and or implementing it in core and creating a pull request wouldn't be very difficult (I hope).

[Bri]

I know, it seems like all the parts are there, and it's been floating around in my mind to do it and make a PR but like I said it was more curiosity around why no one else would want that functionality in core...

[julian]

Yeah, the bookmarking functionality is built using localStorage, although it's possible to move that out to a plugin so that it can handle both based on admin setting...

[Bri]

So I made a PR... I just wanted to see if this is something we can put into the core / concerns of doing so. Please give it a quick look to see if this is something that would be feasible:

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/pull/3234

bdharrington7 created this issue in NodeBB/NodeBB

closed Saving user bookmarks in db #3234