Different post options depending on page navigation method?

I have yet to see that. Sorry. I have limited abilities to test Safari too and all my personal postings are on Chrome or Brave. Do they reappear with refreshing the page?

Could be even just a you glitch or something else on your end. I'll see if others report it but I don't think it's a real software bug

Thanks. Yep, reloading the page after using the browser forward/back button brings the buttons back too. I'll have to see how Chrome and Edge behave on my Windows work laptop (haven't had a chance to test there) to see if the forward/back behavior is same or not.

I was just glad to finally figure out the "inconsistency" in button availability I was seeing.

Using Opera for a browser, which I believe is based on Chrome, Windows machine.
I purposely went into a long thread so I could load a couple pages. Using my browser's "forward" and "back" buttons does, in fact, make the "reply" and LOL buttons go away. Using the "<<Prev" and "Next>>" buttons at the top of the thread, those buttons remain visible.
I am not concerned though, tbh, I'm just testing because I'm an engineer and I had to see if it happened on my computer.
Part of me thinks it has something to do with the fact that when you use the "<<Prev" or "Next>>" or "1" "2" etc buttons, it reloads the page, while when you click your browser's "forward" and "back" buttons, it pulls (mostly) from memory.

Actually, now I have to ask a question: What is the "Reply" button for? It is same as "quote" but without the quote. So it is creating a bare post, same as the "quick reply" (or "reply" as found in the "quick reply") box at the bottom. Or is it different somehow?

Just tested both Edge and Chrome on my Windows 10 laptop and they show the same behavior as Safari and what Adelard of Bath reports with Opera.

Recreation steps:
1. Go to the Welcome to the Forums forum and click page 9 of the Post Counts thread. Full reply bar is visible.
2. From page 9 of the thread, click the page 8 button at the top to go to that page. Full reply bar is visible.
3. Click your browser's back button to go back to page 9. Only the partial reply bar is visible.

I also verified the Back option from the right-click pop-up menu and the Back shortcut key options (<Alt>+<Left arrow> on Chrome and Edge, <Command>+<Left arrow> on Safari) produce the same behavior, and that a reload in each browser returns the full reply bar.

Again, not so much a problem now that I know how to get the full bar back if I'm flipping between pages w/ the browser forward/back options...now I'm just on a mission to have helenabear join us in witnessing the issue, lol. 

I've been running Opera for many years, they used to be their own code, rather than being based on Chrome.  I forget when they announced they were switching to be based on chrome.  But anyways, one of the things I REALLY liked about it way back when was that when I went "back", it was instant - completely from local memory.  Other browsers at the time, I would hit "back" and it would reload the page.  Drove me crazy.  Opera would instantly show any page I had been to that session, back, forward, whatever, super fast.  This was more important when internet was slow.

Opera still pulls the page from local memory if I use "back" but I can see it thinking, so it must be loading something.  But, even on this new ProBoards we are using, it will not show the updated icons for me until I actually reload the page - which for me usually means I've read everything and then I click the "new posts" button at the top just to see if anything new has happened in the last few minutes.

I just had a though - wouldn't it be great (maybe) if I went to a page, and while I was reading, it could crawl through the links and pre-load that stuff for me.  Like it could just do the first level of links, doing the whole page could turn out to be massive.  And it could open a can of worms but I'm maybe liking this idea.  Maybe it's a problem, since I haven't heard of it actually being a thing - I can't imagine I'm the first person to have thought of it.

Oh that's interesting...hmm
I don't know what to say about that.

Out of curiosity, can you do something like I do all the time: you right click on a tab and choose "duplicate tab" which makes an exact copy of that tab's session, including previous pages etc.  I use it all the time to explore my options on a page, without losing my place on that page or ruining what I've done there.  When I'm done messing around, I close that duplicate tab and do what I need to do on the first tab.  Sometimes useful for ordering things, often useful for pages that might timeout on me; I can pop open a duplicate tab and keep that one alive by clicking things, which makes the page think I'm still active so I don't get logged out of the first one.   Used frequently on the DVC page when I am pondering points - I pop open another tab and click random things so it doesn't think I've walked away from the computer.  They don't need to know I'm staring at my points, deep in thought.

I get that, only when I start a new thread. Which is pretty rare.