Replace the timeline scrollbar with something that really represents what's going on.

[lampholder]

I've long found the scrollbar annoying - it's basically showing me 'how many messages are paged into memory' and my position within that list, which doesn't actually map onto a particularly useful mental model.

Slack it seems tries to represent the scrollbar as if the whole of room history were already paged in - resulting in a useful indicator of the scale of the room and my position within it (albeit one that jumps around like anything as it tries to keep itself accurate as more real messages are loaded in).

I understand this would be tricky for us - I think it's computationally expensive to calculate the size of a maximum timeline my user might have access to.

What if we did away with the standard scrollbar entirely? I like the idea of spooling old-school printer paper - some visualisation along oneside to indicated scrolling movement, but without speaking to your specific position within the whole. There could be indicators for when you're near the top or the bottom of your visible room history.

[bwindels]

allowing to jump to a given date/time might help here

[r4dh4l]

allowing to jump to a given date/time might help here

Actually this is the only thing that is currently very missing. Yesterday I was looking for a post made "last year" in an encrypted room so history scrolling is the only way to find it. This can take hours because there is no "jump to date/time" option.

[MadLittleMods]

Slack it seems tries to represent the scrollbar as if the whole of room history were already paged in

For reference, Slack is not doing this anymore (if it was before).

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• URL for an arbitrary day of history and navigation for next and previous days #7677
• Add command to scroll back to specific time, or by relative amount of time #14173
• MSC3030: Jump to date API endpoint matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#3030 tracks a jump to date API