I like the posting of the full article. There will always be a divide among the posters who want the whole article and those who only want the links. When I click a link and return to FR, it always takes me back to the top of the page I left. Then I have to scroll down to find where I left off and I don’t always note the post number or remember it. There are advantages to both styles and it’s impossible to please everyone.
I can kind of see both sides, but my own personal preference is for the full article, for the very same reasons you’ve cited.
Agree re the impossibility of pleasing everyone. No easy answers. Will stay adaptable in the event formatting changes become necessary.
Try this: Right click on the link, click Open Link in New Tab, read the article, close it out (X), and the page you left on FR will still be where it was.
It always annoyed me too when I clicked on a link and lost my place in FR until I started doing it this way. I don’t read the long articles in FR even though I’m guilty of writing them at times. :-)
Remembering the early days of FR and internet crashes, created habits for conserving band width. Band width back then was mentioned a Lot and not only FR.
Perhaps, as it turns out, that bandwidth was never the cause of the case. Idk. Nevertheless, I remember that page gobbling was discouraged for that reason. It stuck with verbose me, and other freepers to try to be succinct, to respect the thread.
( As for this thread, Q was the pinnacle of succinct. If you were going to make a hand at educating yourself, you did research, as Q directed to a source(s). Q did not make you passive, by rattling it all off, while we sat there. )
Now we’re reading volumes of not digs, but some other bloggers whole opinion, sometimes over and over.
Back to habits... over time, FR crashes were attributed more to equipment
failures, with sometimes days of repair. Then, we got FR member growth & contributions and new equipment. Over all, the internet became the trouble free behemoth we know today.
I admit I had not considered the impact of the page gobbling to be much more more acute to FR phone users, when faced with these insufferable “novellettes”, serving as comments.
Of course, it’s no revelation that pleasing Everyone is impossible. Believe me, I am guilty. However, even common courtesy is about pleasing some, but not always everyone.
Complaints are sometimes easily suffocated, where only one might pop up now and then and could be easily ignored.
As the page gobble has “caught on” and is more frequent, so are the questionsable notations about its value, particularly when links Suffice. Apparently, it is not confined to phone users after all.
My question was to ask ourselves simply, “What if everyone did this”, at will.
I stand corrected if Everyone is afraid to click links and really loves the page gobble. It means Q Thread has adapted from its beginnings, with Q #1.
Becoming a more impersonal meme house for public artists and a run way for Un-edited editorializing of un-edited editorials is certainly a new direction.
Maybe it’s the hottest ticket in town and I am just much slower to be grateful. 🤷♀️
Mark.
(.)
My personal convenience often rules me, as well. 😄
Right click the link and click on "open link in new tab"