On the old software we received a lot of requests for a way to jump to specific pages in long threads, and this weekend we built a quick feature to do this that was released tonight. Now if you see the ellipses (…) on a long topic, you can click them and you’ll see an alert (IE users will have an annoying nag about allowing scripted windows) allowing you to input a page number and go right to it.
We are only displaying it in this subtle way, and only on long threads where the pagination truncates to avoid clutter and confusion on the pagination interface, but we may make it more prominent in the future.
If you want to test it out, try this huge thread about Obama.