Scroll jumping in this meta site while viewing threads

Bug
1

Ugh, this has been driving me nuts. In this meta forum, as I slowly scroll through threads with many replies using the mouse wheel, the scroll positioning will frequently jump up. This may be tough to explain clearly…

Find a thread with many replies and slowly mouse-wheel down. As the top of a comment is reached and the comment begins to scroll up, the avatar of the user who wrote the comment continues to move down. Cute feature… except that when the avatar reaches the bottom of its comment, and the top of the page transitions to another comment/avatar, the page may jump backward to reposition somewhere above the new comment.

The result is that I can continue to scroll down slowly and not move past some replies. I need to grab the scrollbar and pull down beyond the comments, then scroll up a bit to read them, and hope that they don’t jump again.

And of course … this anomaly does not manifest if I am running a GIF screen capture. :facepalm:

I’m running the latest Firefox v130.0 production. Haven’t tried other browsers or versions yet, nor have I looked into the browser debug messages. I’m just hoping to get some confirmation, before extensive attempts are requried to reproduce the issue.

Thanks.

2 Likes
2

This is a tough one, similar issues have been reported before, but without a consistent repro we can address this.

some things to try:

  • Slow down network in dev tools
  • Slow down machine in dev tools

We really need a full end to end reproduction to resolve this. Trivially I am having difficulty but maybe this is network / computer speed related.

2 Likes
3

I have recently noticed this issue on my own Discourse instance too.

4

Thanks guys. Glad it’s not just me, and not just on this site.
Let’s try to get some facts in here to see if it’s browser-specific or related to some other common factor. I’ll do what I can…

1 Like
5

This is not a fix, and depending on your habits it may not help at all, but you can try the keyboard shortcuts (j and k). The documentation for them was slightly misleading last time I saw it – these keys do not always jump to the next or previous post. If the current post is longer than 1 screen, these keys will scroll / page through it until you have seen all of it, only then shift to another post.

6

I agree the documentation is a bit confusing:

The image displays a user interface with three navigation tabs at the top: Back, Move selection, and Open selected topic, followed by two button choices to either enter or exit the topic, and another button to shift to the first unread post. (Captioned by AI)

But if you don’t want the “scrolling” use shiftj

1 Like
7

This has always been the case for me on every Discourse forum I have used. (In Firefox – I haven’t tested with other browsers.)
It’s absolutely infuriating when trying to read a thread, and makles Discourse forums almost unusable for me.

I have a screen recording, but I’m not allowed to upload it here.

8

:wave: Could you at least provide us with a link to a topic where you have experienced the issue please?

2 Likes
9

Today we’ve applied a minor update that seems to improve this situation — it looks like the issue is with how Firefox handles position: sticky; on avatars in posts as you scroll… the browser seemed to try to jump up to include the avatar sometimes when you try to scroll past it.

This specifically seemed to be an issue with higher refresh rates (I was able to reproduce it on a Macbook with “ProMotion”)… so it seems to be a very specific Firefox bug.

The workaround was to add overflow-anchor: none;

After updating Discourse, please let us know if you continue to experience the issue.

6 Likes