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I have just been looking through the questions to answer those that I can and as I go to the next page (using the Next button at the bottom) I am presented with the same questions.

I imagine this is not a flaw and in fact questions are coming in fast filling up a page pushing my current page to the next one.

An idea to solve would be to set a variable for starting id when I start paging and only clicking an update button will reset the starting id.

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A possible mitigation of the effect could also be achieved by displaying a higher number of questions per page and basically only scanning the first page. For older questions search specifically with tags. There the update frequency is much lower. Only on SO and without any filtering this is a problem currently. –  Trilarion Jun 5 at 10:49
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This wouldn't actually work in any generic way, since they aren't ordered by Id, the orders are all over the place...some are based on last edit, last activity, when the bounty ends, how many views they have, how many votes...all of which are in flux an don't lend themselves to a linear list.

This hasn't really been a problem historically, especially since those lists of questions are cached for a minute or so typically (more for anonymous)...adding support for something like this would be grossly over-complicating paging IMO. Also, think of what adding parameters like this would do for the URLs google sees and crawls (often not in order - googlebot skips around), it would miss a lot of questions crawling us).

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You mean the bottom questions appearing on top of the next page? Yes, I like this idea. And the variable (or better: datetime stamp) should be kept at the session instance, not as parameter in the URL.

Though I would not use any manual "update" button or mechanism. That would distract and requires again another GUI element. Instead, just leaving the page (other then next or previous) or hitting F5 should reset the variable. I think that will be intuitive enough; mostly I open questions in new tabs.

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yes, the bottom questions (in fact, most on the last page) appear on the next page. –  Christian Sep 28 '11 at 11:02
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