My browser has a search-in-page feature and hotkey: normally when I press control-F I can enter a word and find it in the page.
This forum hijacks the control-F hotkey to implement its own search-in-page, but it doesn’t work at all: I can have the word I’m looking for sitting right in the middle of the screen and the forum control-F hijack won’t spot it. I can appreciate that a site which uses endless/infinite scroll may well want to help users by implementing its own search function, but it’s a little provocative to override users’ browsers’ native search functionality with a site search function that just doesn’t work, thus preventing us from searching at all. I can find search somewhere in my browser’s menu system, but it’s very deep in there, presumably because control-F is so automatic that the menu entry is practically unused.
Is there a way to disable the forum’s control-F hotkey hijack please? Could you make it a checkbox in user settings if not?
Just adding the usual warning that in larger topics posts are loaded as you scroll. The browser’s built-in search will only find text in loaded posts, which is why discourse (which powers this forum) provides a search that will search through all posts in a topic whether loaded or not.
That’s why I said “I can appreciate that a site which uses endless/infinite scroll may well want to help users by implementing its own search function.” The fact is though that the Discourse search function doesn’t work. I can type in control-F, “camera” <return>, with “camera” right there on the page in front of me, and the Discourse search will find nothing. So, as currently broken, and without highlighting the workaround, hijacking control-F is simply profoundly annoying. The fact that the workaround exists is fantastic, but it could do with better advertising…
@paulakreuzer it’s kind of incosistent. I just checked it here and it actually only “searched this topic” (the box was checked). Sometimes it doesn’t work though.
Ok, well that’s getting kindof weird then. I assumed that the point of hijacking control-F was that modern interface design (infinite scroll) meant the historic behaviour, “search this page”, no longer worked right because infinite amounts of the document might not yet be loaded in the browser. So you hijack control-F and re-implement it to achieve search-in-page successfully within the infinite-scroll paradigm — to allow users’ learned behaviour to still be correct. Why on earth would you hijack it to do something completely different to what control-F normally does?
Anyway I’m guessing this is all outwith your control anyway, so my railing about the counterintuitiveness of things is probably just irritating. Thanks for the workaround: as Discourse has become more popular this has been driving me up the wall more and more often recently.
