Scaling archives: more pages?

[J16053]

Current Behavior

As the gazelle keeps growing and more issues are created, the archives page will have to list a lot more past issues. Right now, the ArchivesController just gets a set number of issues that seems to be a large enough number to not be a problem for a couple more years if the Gazelle continues to publish once a week, but it'd be good to come up with a better long-term solution.

Possible Solution

We could start by fetching in reverse chronological order so that we don't run into the problem we did this semester where recent articles were visibly missing, and then maybe fetching and displaying more dynamically as the user scrolls down? Or perhaps having multiple numbered pages? This would require some front-end changes, and is a design choice.

https://www.thegazelle.org/archives

[J16053]

Related to #131 : reverse chronological order should be prioritized, but pagination for archives, authors, and categories can be done all at once

[navyasuri]

Thanks for bringing this up!
We definitely need to start fetching in reverse order, regardless of design choices on the archives page. Additionally, I think building a better archives page might be a nice idea as well. For now, I will approve the hacky PR to fix it, but moving further we best redesign the archives page. 50 or so "issues" per page, and an additional section for categories/specials etc would be ideal.
It would be a bit of work but an excellent exercise: could be tackled by a group of people instead of just one developer.