[quote=@Mahz]
[quote=@LegendBegins]
Would a back button be more difficult than telling the server to go to page - 1?
[/quote]

The hack is that, unlike for posts and PMs, there are no pages for recent-posts and convos. 

I go through great length to get fast pagination for posts and PMs by monotonically increasing a number that starts at 0 for each post/PM in that topic/convo (I call it the post.idx and pm.idx). That way it's easy to calculate which range of idx to query from the database given a page number and the amount of posts/PMs to display per page. The database is fast at "WHERE idx > X AND idx < Y" queries.

That system doesn't work as well for things with high churn like convos, so I'll see if I can get a previous-button working with the current hack.

[quote=@Captain Jordan]
Indeed, a simple javascript back would be an easy hack for the meantime.
[/quote]

Oh man. Didn't think of that nasty hack which actually isn't that bad since a user is never deep-linking to a page of recent-posts or convos.

It'll be my quick plan B if plan A sucks. :lol
[/quote]

So it essentially generates "pages" based on the number of posts to display, while no true pages are being generated, but simply a number of posts to display before breaking forward, which is why you can't go back? Because there's theoretically no place to go back to?