Mike is ranting about paginated stories (as Jason has in the past (and as my colleague Jim has grumbled)), but this is one of those things that I've strangely never really cared about. I suspect users don't care that much, and I've just always been willing to find the "print" button. I don't want to turn this into a web design blog, but does this really bother any of you?
It's just, like, one of those things, man. Because the print view doesn't provide navigation, etc. and isn't really optimized for reading onscreen (not that most media sites *are*...) and, well, it just plain annoys the shit outta me.
An acceptable compromise would be to let me toggle pagination on/off as a feature, say, if I register as a user. That seems like more of a win/win, actually, because then I don't have to flip through 4 pages to read a 500 word article (*cough*NEWSWEEK!*cough*) and you get another happily registered user on which you can begin compiling demo data to sell to advertisers.
Of course, this pre-supposes a user-registration system...
posted by Jim Ray at 6:36 PM on April 19, 2007 
It's never bothered me, and I had not realized it was a source of annoyance to others.
posted by Ang at 6:39 PM on April 19, 2007
It bothers me to my very core.
posted by Tyler at 6:39 PM on April 19, 2007
In news sites I am undecided. I'd love it if most news sites had a toggle that could be saved in my cookie which allowed me to turn off pagination. Sometimes I like pagination and sometimes I don't. It mostly depends on article length.
But in technical documents or tutorials I hate it. I want to be able to search across the whole article with my in browser 'find' which pagination breaks.
posted by bryan kennedy at 6:44 PM on April 19, 2007
Drives me crazy. I hate clicking and clicking, I hate finding the "next" button every time, I hate the unformatted print versions, I hate looking for a term I searched for, I hate not being able to quickly look back for something I missed, I hate paging back so I can link someone.
posted by Nick Douglas at 7:03 PM on April 19, 2007
i hate paginated stories! in addition to the above-noted things i like to be able to tell based on the right hand scroll bar how far thru a story i am / how long the story is, and pagination ruins that.
f**ing pagination. i hate it. useless distracting clicks, what are the point.
posted by zak sharman at 7:12 PM on April 19, 2007
It bothers me to Tyler's core.
posted by Mike D. at 7:36 PM on April 19, 2007
I hate it, but it's made better with the NextPlease Firefox extension.
posted by Brad at 9:15 PM on April 19, 2007
If pagination makes one angry enough to rant about one is either a) a professional ranter who should be ignored or b) someone who is blessedly free of real problems
posted by paul at 11:28 PM on April 19, 2007
It bugs me in a small way each time. So its ubiquity definitely does bother me, in the aggregate.
posted by Jake at 9:18 AM on April 20, 2007
It bothers me, because the paginated stories always seem to come whenever a site is slowest. It's a Murphy's Law thing, I guess. Just give me the friggin' story and don't make me play hide and seek. The first such time this occured to me was in 1998 when I...
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posted by Safran at 4:32 PM on April 20, 2007
Goddamn, yes it bothers me.
posted by marc at 8:06 PM on April 21, 2007
Don't knock article pagination until you tried to run a free web service that is advertising driven.
CPM is still king in advertising no matter how much everyone would prefer user-attention metrics.
If it bothers you you could only visit sites you subscribe to, or just go *buy* your daily papers. There's still no free lunch, not even for internet consumers ;>
posted by Ted Rheingold at 2:31 PM on April 23, 2007
Dear Ted:
Newspapers have pagination, too. You know, pages. That's the nice thing about using a totally different medium--you're not limited by all of the old constraints.
And just because CPM is everyone's revenue source doesn't mean it should be, or that people have no right to complain about inelegant and user-inconveniencing information presentation.
posted by Jake at 7:29 AM on April 24, 2007
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