Will Forum Pagination Be Fixed Soon?! Broken For Months.

[randyinla 14]

Not trying to be critical, or mean, or judgmental.  My intention is a better forum experience for everyone.

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Every single one of your categorized forums has had broken pagination for months.  Each page link at the bottom is missing the name/category of the forum in the URL, so clicking any page # results in being switched to a non-categorized forum without realizing it.   I saw someone else's post about this from a few months ago and the response was basically, "We had a fix, but when we deployed, it broke a bunch of other things".   Can you extract/cherry pick the pagination fix and deploy just that one thing?  I find it extremely frustrating to go into a forum and then realize a few pages in that I'm not in that forum anymore.  If someone is in that non-categorized forum and creates a new post, it doesn't show up in the main forum overview of all categories because it doesn't have a category.  To me, this should take higher priority than any other forum fix, such as CSS/styling issues, as this prevents people from seeing anything but the first page of any forum.

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In this 'Ultimaker.com Feedback' forum, each pagination link is:

https : //ultimaker.com/en/community?topics=1&sort=latest&type=all&page=2

When it should look like this:

https : //ultimaker.com/en/community/general/ultimakercom-feedback?topics=1&sort=latest&type=all&page=2

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If I leave the pagination links alone and manually add "&page=2" to the current URL, then I can proceed to the actual page 2, 3, etc.,

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Thank you for any consideration to fixing at least this one, tiny thing that is such a huge part of any forum.

-=Randy

Edited May 3, 2017 by Guest

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi, thank you for mentioning this again but don't you worry for a second we have forgotten about it I checked, and it is currently on the top of our 'bug-list', however this does not mean it will automatically be the first one to be addressed. The required amount of resources to fix it are also a big influencer that determine wheter it fits in the new sprint or not. Unfortunately it was investigated and proven to be a back-end issue which was not easy to solve.

The full focus of our dev team lies on making the whole site faster (which is also nice!), server migration and a better cms (also back end).

I'll check in person with the PO if he can make any statement on when he thinks it may be included in the new sprint.

Our apologies about the inconvenience!

[DaHai8 74]

Hack the URL (until its fixed)

Past this on the end of the URL on the first page of the forum to see subsiquent pages:

?topics=1&page=1

Change the page= to the page number you want to view. ie:

https://ultimaker.com/en/community/software-and-firmware/cura-and-marlin?topics=1&page=2

https://ultimaker.com/en/community/software-and-firmware/cura-and-marlin?topics=1&page=3

[randyinla 14]

Thank you for the reply, DaHai8, but I already had that information in my original post

Edited May 10, 2017 by Guest

[randyinla 14]

Hi, thank you for mentioning this again but don't you worry for a second we have forgotten about it ;)I checked, and it is currently on the top of our 'bug-list', however this does not mean it will automatically be the first one to be addressed. The required amount of resources to fix it are also a big influencer that determine wheter it fits in the new sprint or not. Unfortunately it was investigated and proven to be a back-end issue which was not easy to solve.

The full focus of our dev team lies on making the whole site faster (which is also nice!), server migration and a better cms (also back end).

I'll check in person with the PO if he can make any statement on when he thinks it may be included in the new sprint.

Our apologies about the inconvenience!

 

Thank you for the response, SandervG. Making the forum faster doesn't help much if the navigation doesn't let you get around in the first place Makes me think of tuning the engine of a car to make it faster when the transmission has fallen out.

As a web app developer, when I see issues like this, it probably makes me more frustrated than the average forum visitor because I can envision a fix in my head. If saying it's a back-end issue and not easy to solve means you might be able to fix it faster if it were fixable with just the front end, then that might be a possibility. I understand that the backend is sending the pagination info to the front end, but after a quick glance, I see that the breadcrumb just above the first post is displaying the correct current path to the forum. The front end should be able to grab that text after the page loads, parse through it to get the names it needs (eg.General -> Ultimaker.com Feedback), reformat it for the URL ("/general/ultimakercom-feedback) and insert the missing parts into each pagination link... until the backend developer can fix what it is sending the front end.

Granted, I don't know what you are using for front/backend (ie.could be some WYSIWYG forum package/framework where it's not feasible to do custom Javascript functions after the page loads), I'm just throwing out suggestions of how I'd approach it if the backend dev was unavailable and my forum was broken

[randyinla 14]

For example, I can type the following two lines of jQuery into the console log of my browser (it works because you are using jQuery in your page) and update all displayed pagination links with the correct "href" and "data-replace-href".   *I noticed that changing the href only would update the URL but still display the wrong content in the page and updating the data-replace-href only would display the correct content but the URL would now be wrong.  So they both have to be updated to fix the link.

 

var urlFix = "/en/community" + $('ul.breadcrumbs > li > a').slice(2).map(function(){ return "/"+$(this).text().trim().replace(/\s/g, '-').replace(/[?.]/g, ''); }).toArray().join('').toLowerCase(), newHref;$('a.pagination-page').each(function(){ newHref=urlFix+$(this).prop('href').split('/en/community')[1]; $(this).attr('data-replace-href', newHref).prop('href', newHref) });

 

The first line grabs all of the breadcrumb texts after the first two, (so it excludes: "Community -> Forum") then replaces spaces with '-' and removes '?' and '.'.  You'd have to update the 2nd regex to exclude any other character displayed in the breadcrumb that shouldn't be part of the resulting URL.

The 2nd line grabs every pagination link and replaces the "/en/community" part of href & data-replace-href with the correct URL.  

These two lines could be put into a function and called whenever the page initially finishes loading and then after every AJAX call to load a new page via the pagination links.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Guest

[randyinla 14]

I just realized my solution doesn't update the pagination links for First page | Previous page | Next page | Last page, just the numbered page links.  Here is the 1st line again with an update to the 2nd line to include those:

 

var urlFix = "/en/community" + $('ul.breadcrumbs > li > a').slice(2).map(function(){ return "/"+$(this).text().trim().replace(/\s/g, '-').replace(/[?.]/g, ''); }).toArray().join('').toLowerCase(), newHref;$('a.pagination-page, a.pagination-link').each(function(){ newHref=urlFix+$(this).prop('href').split('/en/community')[1]; $(this).attr('data-replace-href', newHref).prop('href', newHref) });

Again, this would just be a temporary quick fix to put into place for forum pagination links until the backend can be updated to send the right pagination URLs. It seems like all of the other pagination links, like for pages pertaining to an individual post, work fine.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Guest

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi @Randyinla, thank you very much for your suggestions! I'm definitely going to share them with our developers, perhaps it is an option they have not thought of and could be used as a (temporarily) fix. Thanks!!

[yellowshark 153]

Hi @SandervG may I add my support to this point. This has been bugging me and lol I have just seen this thread. For me it makes the forum almost unusable if you are trying to catch up on posts - sometimes I access the forum every day and sometimes I stay off for a while - nothing to do with Ultimate, just my acquired practice to get off the web and have a life!

Personally I think this is so important that every needed developer should be taken off 2.5 project or whatever and get this fixed - I do not have the time or inclination to start modifying URLs to get the Forum working when that should be a given.