Make finding things easier in noJS view

[selfthinker]

Feature Request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When JavaScript is disabled or otherwise interrupted or not working, the noJS view of Flarum is just about good enough for reading forum posts. But it is very difficult to find anything. Filtering by tags, ordering and searching would help a lot with finding things but none of those features are available in the noJS view.

Describe the solution you'd like

I found that the result pages of filtering, ordering and searching already work without JavaScript. For example, https://discuss.flarum.org/?q=test shows search results for the search term "test" correctly when JS is disabled. The noJS view just misses the search box to trigger those results. The same is true for filtering and ordering. The functionality is there, it's just that their respective triggering element is missing.

I would propose to at least include a search box in the noJS view. It would be the easiest to implement as it only needs a form that triggers a get request to the start page. And it would have the biggest impact out of those three features.

Filtering by tag and ordering would obviously also be helpful. But those are probably more difficult to implement.

Justify why this feature belongs in Flarum's core, rather than in a third-party extension

I don't think it's possible to do that in an extension? (I don't know the code base at all.) It's a very basic feature that is good for everyone. (Well, everyone who at least occasionally doesn't get all of the JS. Which is basically everyone.)

Describe alternatives you've considered

Initially I thought of having a search box that posts to Google. But because I then found that Flarum's search results work fine without JS, that wouldn't be necessary.

As a user the only alternative is using a search engine to search the forum. But most users will not have the knowledge on how to show results only for a specific site and will probably end up elsewhere.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. We do this to keep the amount of open issues to a manageable minimum. In any case, thanks for taking an interest in this software and contributing by opening the issue in the first place!

[stale[bot]]

We are closing this issue as it seems to have grown stale. If you still encounter this problem with the latest version, feel free to re-open it.

[askvortsov1]

I would like to keep this around. While the vast majority of Flarum frontend work is focused around our JS frontend, we should still try to be at least a little accessible to non-JS users.

[nina-py]

Currently there are no search results in the noJS mode. There is only the logo with a link to the home page and an alert box. Screenshot attached.

[selfthinker]

That is weird, the very same page looks different to me and shows the search results when I have JS disabled.

[nina-py]

Apologies - this must have been something to do with the Firefox extension I used to toggle JS on and off. Retested in Chrome and Firefox without the extension (just editing the config variable) and I do see the search results on the page.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. We do this to keep the amount of open issues to a manageable minimum. In any case, thanks for taking an interest in this software and contributing by opening the issue in the first place!

[askvortsov1]

This issue also has implications for SEO: we should make sure all necessary information is included.

Ref: https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/189

[askvortsov1]

See https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/1820 for lots of relevant discussion on the SEO bits of this.