@startagain, the decision to disengage from common searches was Team Torum's way of negating the non-SEO friendly nature of SPA. I have never seen this tactic before. Consequently, I really can't offer my yeah or nay on the decision. Major Props to you. Your question inspired me to write this for the community.
However, I do agree that SPA is the way to go for Torum.
To @yfenggo, @admins and Torum Community Landers,
I understand your decision as SPAs are not very SEO friendly; only getting a one page snapshot that's not indicative of the site's value.
[NOTE: The rest of this comment is more for other Landers than for you and the Torum Team. You guys already know what I'm about to say.]
Last year while accessing Torum with only my cheap smartphone, I began poking around Torum's code.
Remember that?
The multiple instances of Reactjs made it quite clear to me that Torum was a SPA platform (as it should be).
I can't imagine the nightmare of UI design layers needed to do otherwise! And I agree with Team Torum's decision.
The use case, speed, responsiveness and less coding makes the SPA model the best fit for Torum.
I'm sure that the ability to port most of the backend to a future mobile app, the handling of a user's iffy/low internet connection and parallax scrolling was considered beforehand, no?
I just hope that any attempt of a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack has been sufficiently guarded against with proper divisions of Torum's javascript.
I really don't care about the inability to save browser history, but I see a Hell of a lot of work required by the staff because of SPAs inherent limits on scalability.
Adding to a page means more loading time; whereas in MPAs you simply make a new page for new information.
"Nuff nerdy stuff for now.
In Lak'ech, JaiChai
(JaiChai 8 OCT 2021. Simultaneousmulti-site submissions posted. All rights reserved.)