Scrollbar and back button behavior in megatopics

MarrisseA · February 26, 2021, 5:58pm

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

Go to talk.collegeconfidential.com
Go to a long thread like this

Observed Result/s

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

Go to talk.collegeconfidential.com
Go to a long thread like this

Observed Result/s

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!

codinghorror · March 2, 2021, 5:05am

Safe mode is a good start.

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

MarrisseA · March 3, 2021, 11:53am

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!

osioke · March 4, 2021, 4:29pm

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

MarrisseA · March 4, 2021, 4:43pm

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

osioke · March 4, 2021, 5:35pm

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

Falco · March 4, 2021, 6:20pm

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

MarrisseA · March 4, 2021, 6:22pm

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.

MarrisseA · March 11, 2021, 4:57pm

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?

Falco · March 11, 2021, 5:02pm

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

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.

MarrisseA · March 11, 2021, 5:31pm

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!