Is there any ability to navigate between discussions?

rkleemann

Like having a prev/next link to skip between discussions within a category?

R_J

Someone has asked the same question recently and that was my comment:

@R_J said:
Okay, I really understand your point and I guess it wouldn't be too complicated. The only thing I don't think which is easy is to decide which discussion is the next one and which is the previous one.

Let's do it by an example. Two questions:

1.When you open up this discussion, which discussion should be the previous discussion and which discussion should be the next discussion?
2. Imagine you have a very active community where there are many new posts in 5 minutes und you need 10 minutes to read one discussion. Would the "old" next/previous discussion still be the discussion you expected to see 10 minutes before?

He never came back with an answer.

Speaking about an active community where there is one category rarely used and another category is used all the time. When a user opens a discussion from the recent discussions list and he clicks on "Next Discussion" wouldn't he expect to see the next discussion from the list he has seen just a second ago in the discussions list? But when this discussion was one of the seldom used category he might end up in a very old discussion which would be kind of awkward.

Do you really think previous and next in the same category wouldn't be irritating?

rkleemann

I understand it might be irritating, or not. But I was only asking a question. Should I assume then, that there is no feature or plugin for this?

R_J

No, I as far as I know there is no such plugin. But if I answer your question with another question it might be because I could think about creating such a plugin but simply don't know how it should work

rkleemann

@R_J said:
No, I as far as I know there is no such plugin. But if I answer your question with another question it might be because I could think about creating such a plugin but simply don't know how it should work

I guess there are some possibly confusing scenarios, but if at the time of entering a discussion you "snapshot" what the previous and next are from the context of the discussions list, doesn't that make it a little simpler?

In other words, at the time in which a discussion is entered (from the index, or from a prev/next) whichever are the ones adjacent to it according to the default chronological sorting would be considered the previous and next.

R_J

Maybe it could already be solved by changing the wording? "Older Discussions" and "Newer Discussions"? Not sure about that but I guess I will start writing a module. But I might quit my work when I get stuck in the design. I'll do it on GitHub and you will be able to see what I do and if you are interested in learning/supporting, feel free to do so But I might not be able to start before Wednesday...