I wouldn’t normally blog about such a thing but I was a little pissed off at the simple yet ridicously stupid comment left by a Valve member on Steam forums.

I found an issue with the Steam user interface on the News Page and decided to report it with a friendly suggestion:

Javascript problem on the Steams UI News Page.

When you scroll to the bottom, it uses Ajax to call the latest news articles, appends them to the bottom of the table and extends the scrollbar. Unfortunately because of this, when you want to use the menu items at the bottom of the page, you can never do so, because the page consistently appends old news on to the bottom. It reminds me of a Mac, try to select something at the bottom and the dock comes up, you can never get to it. lol.

Can we not have some archive feature instead of this? Ajax is great but it introduces some problems I once made this schoolboy error, lovely to see many others make it too… phew.

You could have a button on the News page at the bottom that calls the “LoadMoreNews()” function within the news.js instead? Should do the trick? Perhaps put a counter on there like “show next 10 news articles”, but it’ll have to be dynamic; if the user comes to the last set of news articles, it’ll need to say for example “show next 3 articles”. No doubt you got some object methods/paramaters lurking around with that info.

All the best and good luck!

Ok, so that’s fair enough right? I awaited a response and this is what I got:

It’s intended how it is now. The footer is only included so that news pages that filter to only a few stories don’t end abruptly. If you are viewing all news then you will indeed be scrolling for a long time before reaching it, but it’s not a primary navigation element and is considered less useful than seeing more news.

Well, great feature jmccaskey, I’m really happy to see that Valve’s team are well rehearsed in defending their coding… Boo.

Anyway, just a rant of the day kind of thing. Hope they fix it.

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