Double buttons in posting section? Puzzled

Hello, I am new to Discouse and I am currently seting up my forum. For most questions I can rely on older posts in this forum, so this is great. But for this one I did not find a solution and I find my problem quite puzzling.

In my test posting section there are two buttons for “reply” and for “tracking” posts. These seem to have the same purpose. So why are they double? I would like to disable either ones, is that possible? If I could choose, the buttons on the right side of the page have to go.

Here is a picture. Thank you for your valuable help and have a good day!

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The buttons at the timeline allow you to change the notification level and reply to the topic while reading a topic. When you are at the bottom, those disappear:

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Hello @Moin, thank you for your super quick response! The buttons do not disappear at my forum. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I disabled the “related topics” feature that would follow at the bottom?

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Just added the “suggested topics” feature again for testing purposes. The two buttons at the slider disappear. They don’t disappear when I set “suggested topics” to zero. Seems to be a bug.

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you may want to reply or change the tracking status before reaching the end of the topic

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I think I can see what you’re saying. When you are already scrolled to the bottom of the page on the initial load of the topic, the notification bell / reply icons are displayed. Those disappear if you scroll up / back down.

Is that what you’re seeing?

This doesn’t appear to be related to Suggested Topics though. I can reproduce with suggested topics set to “0” or “5”, and on posts with or without Suggested displayed.

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Hi @lindsey, this is what happens at my forum. The buttons do not disappear when suggested topics is 0.

Can you confirm that’s the bottom of the page (and not just the bottom of the last post in the topic)? Do you have a Related Topics section further down?

That is definitely the bottom of the page and there is no related topics section further down, because i deactivated it by setting “suggested topics” to 0.

Got it. Just to note, Related Topics and Suggested Topics are different so disabling one does not necessarily mean you’ve disabled the other, which is why I asked!

I’m going to move this to Support since this is not a consistent issue. What theme are you using?

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Ok thanks I did not know the difference. I am using the starting default theme.

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I can reproduce in safe mode

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Ah, interesting — thanks @Moin! We must have some customization on Meta and on the theme I was using on my test site — when I changed it to Default I could also reproduce.

Let me ask around to see how we’re doing that.

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Probably the “Powered by Discourse” link

This works based on the timeline’s distance from the bottom of the page, specifically we have an empty container called topic-bottom below the last post. When the timeline passes this, it becomes “docked” and the controls are hidden.

When a browser window is tall enough, and there isn’t enough content below the topic footer controls, you might not ever reach this state.

Here’s an example… in this tall browser window, this is as low as my timeline can get… there’s no more content to scroll

But if I make my window shorter, I need to scroll more to reach the bottom, and if it’s short enough… this will make the buttons disappear.

One possible path for improvement that comes to mind would be to hide the buttons in the timeline based on the distance from the footer buttons rather than the end of the topic (this could end up being more complicated than it’s worth in practice though).

Doing that would mean that my first screenshot above would still show both, which might be ok because there’s a greater distance between the two… and it would probably be a little more controllable in situations like this one below, where they’re close, but haven’t passed yet… and it makes sense to hide them

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