Pinned pullout is jumping

harrrrrry

I’ve noticed this happening in preview several times this morning. Not seen it before in the preview, or in regular daily use on the public community, so presume it’s a “feature” of the new beta.

It’s best explained in the form of a video:

https://vimeo.com/505171602

First, a clue to the presentation

in the pullout, I use the yellow background to highlight unread posts
in the pullout, I also use black to highlight the post being currently read

So, from 0 to 18 seconds, you see the pinned pullout working as expected:

I click on the next yellow panel
that panel turns black and the associated message is retrieved
you see me scrolling the message up and down to represent reading that message
the unread messages remain on screen below the black one

But it goes wrong at 22 seconds:

I click on the next yellow message
the corresponding message is displayed
but the pinned pullout unexpectedly jumps right back to the top

ianmorland

Thanks for the report harrrrrry 👍️

I see you have some heavily customized CSS in use there. Considering the huge changes to the Flarum front end in this release, perhaps you could try this without any customizations in the first instance?

ianmorland

harrrrrry I’m pushing out a few changes and & updates here today. The fix from Flarum is already included and deployed, would you mind checking it out to verify if it’s worked for you please?

harrrrrry

ianmorland

I’ll have to try that later when there are some more unread messages to test with.

But my css is limited to colour changes and I know of no way that css can change the functionality of a page, only its appearance.

Unless of course there’s something strange in the functionality of the code that uses a specific background colour as a way of identifiying the next unread message, rather than a message class. But then, I’d expect it to have been broken in the first 18 seconds too.

harrrrrry

mrjeeves

Apparently, there wasn’t a reported issue, but there is a fix:

ianmorland

Does #2402 help us in any way to fix this ?

harrrrrry

My original test was in firefox 64 bit

But here’s the same happening in an unmodified Opera (73.0.3856.344) with no css changes

Here, at around 30 seconds, you see me clicking on my first unread message “Test Stage beyond preview” and though that’s the message displayed in the window, the pinned pullout has scrolled right back to the first message.

mrjeeves

harrrrrry

I can reproduce on Chrome, but it seems to be a Flarum core issue. I’ll see if there’s anything that can be done about it.

EDIT: Yep, it’s present on a default Flarum forum – that makes it mildly easier to diagnose!

harrrrrry

mrjeeves it seems to be a Flarum core issue

Is it listed as a bug anywhere on the flarum site?

I rely very heavily on using the pinned pullout. It’s one of the main advantages of flarum over lithium, So it would quickly drive me bananas if the change gets rolled out to the main community with the pullout continually scrolling back to the top (and therefore defeating the purpose of the pullout), as it did on preview in the video.

harrrrrry

mrjeeves it’s present on a default Flarum forum

Yes, I confirmed that by doing a further test using their support forum.

A search for “pinned pullout” in that forum found no mention. Though flarum’s search probably wouldn’t find it even if there were a hundred threads on it. And “pinned” and “pullout” on their own only brought up unrelated issues. Though it seems hard to believe that nobody else has noticed what is such a very fundamentally obvious bug.

So I found their issues list, which also found nothing about pinned pullout. https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/2582 is my report there.

ianmorland

harrrrrry It does, with a but..

As this fix was merged after beta 15 was tagged and released, we won’t be pulling that fix until beta 16 is officially released. This is scheduled for some point in March from memory, then we’ll start planning on when to update the giffgaff codebase with the new core version.

Update: I’ve just had a conversation with Alex, we are going to look at bringing this fix in early. I’ll let you know how I get on with this..

harrrrrry

ianmorland

Well done for getting that sorted.

I’ve tested it and the result, though slightly different to what we had before, seems to be a very acceptable alternative.

To be more specific, the selected post remains remains within the visible scrolled area, though it’s not in the exact same place. But it’s still in the visible area and perfectly usable like that 🙂

So, well done for getting that fixed.

harrrrrry

ianmorland

Sadly, this fix seems not to be working quite so well in the version that made it to release a couple of days ago.

I’m guessing that’s possibly due to complications like frequent thread moves or deletions that we would not have seen in the preview.

A couple of videos to show how it’s currently happening on the live site:

Demo starting from All Discussions search:

0 to 10 seconds: search and open pinned pullout
10 to 30 seconds: working normally on initial threads
30 seconds: starting to drift after scrolling down
30 to 50 seconds: drifted but still usable (the highlighted thread remains in view)
from about 1 minute onwards: the highlighted thread is now outside the scrolled region and has to be constantly scrolled backwards to retrieve it

Demo to display the problem faster:

0 to 8 seconds: initial setup as before
8 to 22 seconds: click on several Load More prompts
22 seconds onwards: click on any thread – then have to scroll back several messages every time.

Would scrollintoview help here? Preferably with block: center and behaviour: smooth.

I’ve rechecked it on Flarum’s own forum, and not seeing any problem there. But I suspect giffgaff’s threads are more likely to have thread moves/deletions than the Flarum forum.

[EDIT]: Currently using firefox 88.0 64 bit on windows 10.

harrrrrry

I know Ian M is no longer with us, but I’m wondering what the current status is with this.

It’s still a bad problem on the main site. Once I’ve read some new messages I constantly have to scroll back up in the pullout to get to the next unread message.

I’ll retest it here eventually, but will not have time to do that today. Meanwhile, can somebody clarify – did the “partially fixed” fix ever get rolled out to the main site, or is there still a partial fix to come there?

alex_w

Just tested it myself, looks like it still exists. In particular, once you “Load More” it gets particularly annoying.

harrrrrry

alex_w

Yes, as you say its “fairly tolerable” up to the Load More prompt, but after that things become very messy.

The other thing I’ve noticed in recent months is that if you read the messages up to the More prompt, then go out and come back in to https://community.giffgaff.com/all you don’t start with a clean slate of threads with unread posts. All those messages up to the More prompt stay at the top of the list. So, all the threads with unread messages are still below the More prompt. That forces us to scroll the pinned pullout to get to those messages, hence again passing the More prompt and ensuring we still get the problem.

Maybe if we could arrange it so that the refresh button clears that “slate” and starts afresh by compiling a fresh list containing only the threads with unread messages, it would provide a useful workround for the problem.

alex_w Just tested it myself, looks like it still exists

Was that with the new preview, or with the live system?

alex_w

harrrrrry Was that with the new preview, or with the live system?

Preview