Minor bug on loading /latest, aesthetic

ux
1

Category listing jerks to the right after load, as seen here:

I don’t generally see this on the first load, but subsequent reloads of /latest will do the trick. I had trouble seeing this on Meta for a while (until literally writing this topic), but it happens consistently on my forum (and apparently on Meta now, for me).

Found using Chrome/Win7 desktop, reproduced on Firefox. The effect is more pronounced the wider the window is. Only seems to occur while logged in, I don’t see this behavior when browsing anonymously. Nevermind, getting it anonymously on Firefox and Chrome now without much effort.

2

This is a long standing UX bug we have ideally I want us to change the way we size that the topic list uses table-layout: fixed; … @awesomerobot is that doable?

General repro is to keep scrolling down the list of topics.

The problem here is the “categories” column. It very hard to pick a “right size” for it, category names can be super long or short. I guess we could cap it at 150px and then people can do what they will on the site they host if it is too short or long.

2 Likes
3

I remember getting this bug on my forum… I never had this issue on meta so I thought it was due to some modifications on my customize section. I corrected it by adding a fixed width to this column, I didn’t know how to fix it otherwise

.topic-list td.category {
    width: 145px;
    font-size: 1em;
}

But this wouldn’t work on every forums due to categories’ names lengh

2 Likes
4

Oh weird, I just noticed this fairly recently - maybe not very noticeable in certain circumstances (and/or I’m blind except right now).

Cool though, just reportin’ in. :slight_smile:

5

It’s problematic if sites have enormously long category names. We try to strongly discourage this, and put forced ellipsis on catergory badge length. So in theory we could set category column to a fixed width of maximum “allowed” category badge width…