Scrollbar and back button behavior in megatopics

Hi, I’d like to report some issues that we’re currently having in long threads. Our site is hosted at talk.collegeconfidential.com.

1. Scrollbar doesn’t work well in long posts

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Go to talk.collegeconfidential.com
  2. Go to a long thread like this
  • Observed Result/s
  1. Clicking on the scrollbar does not immediately take you to the correct post. You have to click it twice.

Here’s a screen recording.

2. Back button does not appear in long posts

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Go to talk.collegeconfidential.com
  2. Go to a long thread like this
  • Observed Result/s
  1. The back button is not displayed in long threads (compare the behavior of the scrollbar in the long thread with this shorter thread)

Both issues are happening even in Safe mode so we don’t think it’s because of our theme. Note that we’re currently limiting threads to 10,000 posts.

Is this a known issue and has someone already reported it? If yes, what’s the status? I tried looking for similar issues but I couldn’t find any. Thanks!

1 Like

Safe mode is a good start.

What third party plugins, if any, are you using?

2 Likes

Hi @codinghorror ! Yeah, we figured that since we were also getting the issue in Safe mode then it’s probably not an issue with our template.

Here are the plugins that we are currently using in production:

We also have Linkify added as a theme component. Are any of these possibly causing the issue? Thanks for your help!

Try disabling the ads, I have seen a similar issue with ad-heavy sites.

1 Like

Hmmm shouldn’t this be covered by Safe mode though? If this didn’t work in Safe mode would turning the ads off fix it?

Also, we get revenue from ads so we can’t really turn the ads off :sweat_smile:

Were ads showing in safe mode?

It is more of a case of restructuring the positioning of the ads so they do not interfere or struggle space with the scrollbar and back button

1 Like

It’s a feature not bug :laughing:, as explained at:

2 Likes

Nope, ads are not showing in Safe mode. We disabled the theme & plugins, but it was still happening.

We’re actually running an A/B test where the other variation does not have ads sitting below the timeline scroller. The issue still occurs there, so we were thinking this was probably being caused by something other than ads.

Thanks for your input @Falco ! Does this mean that we should limit our threads to less than 10,000 for these issues to stop occurring?

You shouldn’t need to do this, as Discourse will do that automatically for you out of the box:

image

The only way you will get 10k+ posts in a topic is if an admin intentionally re-open the topic, change the default setting, or in a badly made migration that didn’t broke the mega-topics into smaller chunks.

1 Like

I see, we’re already limiting our posts to 10,000. I’ll check with our team about why we currently have some threads that exceed this limit.

Thanks for your help!

1 Like