The topic timeline feature in Discourse is affected by the value of suggested topics. jomaxro reported an issue where the timeline doesn’t scroll as expected when using a non-default suggested topics value (suggested topics = 0). After investigation, eviltrout confirmed it could be a bug and attempted to fix it with a commit. However, the fix broke scrolling on Meta, so it was reverted. eviltrout later provided another commit that mostly fixes the issue. jomaxro tested the fix and reported some remaining issues with the timeline being finicky and jumpy. codinghorror expressed a preference for forcing everyone to use suggested topics rather than spending engineering effort on this unusual non-default settings scenario.
Putting this in Contribute > Bug as I feel this is preventing the normal use of Discourse, but it may be a better fit for Contribute > UX.
I started noticing on one of my sites (internal, so I can’t share a link) that the topic timeline was a bit wonky, and started playing around to try and figure out what was going on. Essentially when using the topic timeline to go to a recent post (like 5 or 6 out of 6) the posts would not scroll as expected, and the post that I scrolled to would not actually be visible. I couldn’t reproduce this on Meta or Stonehearth, nor in my development environment, so I started looking into what was different between the sites. I eventually realized that my site has suggested topics “disabled” (suggested topics = 0), while Meta, Stonehearth, and dev do not. After disabling suggested topics on dev I could reproduce the issue.
@eviltrout, does the topic timeline scrolling assume that there are suggested topics?
I hate to say this, but it’s “mostly” working. Just tested in the two topics I shared with you via PM. They both load correctly now (showing the last post) and using the timeline to go from a post to the last one work, but the timeline itself is very finicky.
Entering a fully read topic results in the browser being scrolled fully, but the timeline is not.
Also, moving via the timeline is incredibly jumpy. In topic 8022, moving the timeline to post 4 results in the timeline jumping to post 2 upon release. Post 3 also jumps to post 2. Post 5 jumps to post 6…etc.
