Nonstandard scrollbars

Whenever I launch Discord and check a server to which I subscribe, the channel says "500+ new messages since" with a red horizontal rule across the text. And so I begin to read the backlog and things proceed as expected for a time but then the scrollbar begins acting up. I might have dragged it from 25% from the top down to maybe 25% from the bottom, but then suddenly it will teleport upwards and many pages of chat will rapidly scroll past, delayed only due to the fact that the images take time to download to my client. So I release the mousebutton and drag the scrollbar back to where it had been the moment the mayhem began, only to find that instead of that being consistent with where I was up to, it's now a random place in the chat. So I have to manually scroll back upwards until I find content I recognise and then begin reading down once more... until the scrollbar gremlin strikes again. This is infuriating. No other program I have ever used in twenty five years behaves this way.

Dragging the scrollbar to the top should take the user to the very first ever entry. Dragging the scrollbar to the bottom should take the user to the very latest entry. As more entries are added to the log, the height of the grip should be reduced, down to a minimum where it is square and therefore still usable. The scrollbar is a widget that the user controls the program with, not the other way around. The user positions the grip where they want it and the program should reflect what the user has done. Inverting this by having the program load whatever content it feels like and reposition the grip to some arbitrary position violates user expectations.

Discord's scrollbars are extremely narrow and difficult to click on successfully. They need to adhere to the widget widths specified by the user in the OS's Control Panel -- just like every other program on the computer does.

Discord's scrollbars are a stealthy colour. If it's a bright day and the backlight isn't strong enough to generate substantial contrast against the Sun then it's very difficult to identify where on the scrollbar the grip currently is. They need to adhere to the widget colours specified by the user in the OS's Control Panel -- just like every other program on the computer does.

The server list frame does not spawn a scrollbar when it should. The only way I am able to see the discs for servers which are neither in the top page-worth of discs nor in the bottom page-worth of discs is to press Ctrl-minus several times to zoom all the way out. At some point, the discs are all small enough that I can see the disc that represents the server I'm interested in. I can then click it and press Ctrl-zero to reset zoom. If I hit the zoom limit and still cannot see the entire list of server discs, I need to right-click the Desktop, go to Display Options, and rotate the video output temporarily to Portrait, go find the server disc I'm looking for, then restore the video output rotation back to standard Landscape. It's pretty disruptive to background programs doing this, though, and often dislodges toolbars from window borders, etc. Really, the server list frame needs to have a scrollbar just like the channel/chatlog/user frames have each got scrollbars. It seems to me most likely that the software testers were using a small number of test servers on large, high-resolution monitors and therefore never noticed that the server list frame neglects to spawn a scrollbar when its content exceeds its bounds. Users with special hardware (scrollwheels, trackpads) might have ways of getting around Discord's deficiency in this specific case (although searching this Support Feedback forum indicates many of them find these hardware workarounds don't work) but such hacks are no substitute for actually designing the GUI layout correctly in the first place.

Maybe there is some stylistic aesthetic you are chasing which you believe justifies such erratic implementation. Perhaps for the Discord team, upholding this arbitrary theme trumps functionality. For the end user who is not privy to such rationale and merely finds non-standard behaviour and unexpected disruption to be antagonistic, the trade-off isn't worth it. As the Zen of Python states in PEP-20, "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

No doubt it is much easier to just hook standard OS widgets than it is to implement your own DIY mischievous scrollbar doppelgängers. I would suggest doing so.