Hjiacking cmd+F / ctrl + F inside a thread

Meta Discourse
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I’ve noticed that this forum overrides/hijacks the ctrl+f / cmd+f keyboard shortcut inside a thread, and does what looks like a server-side search?

Is there a reason for this? I find it annoying because it’s much slower than having my browser do it for me and I’m unaware of any benefits.

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IIUC, client-side search can’t work because long threads are not (necessarily) loaded at once. For instance, if I open this thread (the currently longest one) and jump to the last post, you can see the delay for the client contacting the server. Or you can browser-search for “shading” while viewing the first post and find no results, while that word appears in later posts.

In case you wonder “why all this fanciness”, traditional (non-AJAX) forums would use user-visible pagination, so you’d have the same (or longer) delays, would have a harder time finding text within the whole thread, and couldn’t see pairs of posts across page breaks.

IIRC this is not configurable by the forum admin — but the Discourse community is always reachable here: https://meta.discourse.org

3 Likes
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IIUC, client-side search can’t work because long threads are not (necessarily) loaded at once. For instance, if I open this thread (the currently longest one) and jump to the last post, you can see the delay for the client contacting the server. Or you can browser-search for “shading” while viewing the first post and find no results, while that word appears in later posts.

Thanks, that clears it up. I guess in my case, I’ve often scrolled to the bottom of the page and want to revisit something I’ve already seen (and loaded client-side) but the remote-search is slow and sometimes never finishes.

In case you wonder “why all this fanciness”, traditional (non-AJAX) forums would use user-visible pagination, so you’d have the same (or longer) delays, would have a harder time finding text within the whole thread, and couldn’t see pairs of posts across page breaks.

I guess I’ve just been around long enough to have accepted that as the norm :smiley:

I’ll close this thread now (edit: nvm don’t know how)

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(I’m learning how to use Discourse as well, but it seems I’m allowed to close the topic! So here goes. Thanks for bringing this up, @lloydmeta–this bugged me too, and thanks @Blaisorblade for the answer/pointers!)