And most don’t?
Sometimes, the square icon “elevators” along side the post as I scroll. Most of them don’t. I hope my description makes sense,
Is this a feature, or a bug?
I thought it was a feature so you could track whose post it is when it’s particularly long.
I thought that might be, but it seems inconsistent. I wonder if so, is there a minimum size for a post before it kicks in?
It doesn’t look to me like it depends on the poster; it looks to me like it depends on how you scroll. If I just scroll down in a thread, then the avatars never float. But if I ever scroll up, even by a single line, then the avatar for the current post appears, and continues to float, until I scroll down to the next post.
Which is a very odd behavior (surely, if floating avatars are desirable, then they should always float?), but it’s consistent. My guess is that always-floating was the design intent, but that it was spaghetti-coded in a messy way that doesn’t always work.
I just tested that on this very thread, and it looks like you’re correct.
Ha! It does!
Interesting!
The only other difference would be in how much the poster has written. If the person writes one-line posts, then it won’t float much, if at all. If they write a novel and a half, then you’re going to see that guy rolling along like a bowling ball.
Yours does. Even in the smallish post.
When I was trying things to figure it out, I never noticed that I was scrolling up when it happened.
I think the logic is, if you’re scrolling from top to down it doesn’t follow because it’s apparent who’s post you’re reading. If you’re scrolling from bottom up, it’s not as apparent because the icon would be at the top of the post. So you’d have to scroll up, and then back down.
I checked how it worked when I was working out how to disable it.
You guys have half of it. It does kick in when you’re scrolling up and the post’s author is not visible. But it also kicks in on longer posts if the post’s author gets scrolled off the page.
It’s not an useless feature, if you remember people’s names by avatar alone. I don’t for many posters, however, and just found it annoying. It just drew my eye, reading like it was moving rather than the page.
If you do not recognize the avatar, you can click on it to see the name. This could be helpful if you find yourself perplexed by a novel and want to recall who wrote it. Just backtrack the tiniest bit until the avatar appears and click on it for a name.
I can think of maybe one time in my entire 13 years here that that’s happened, though. On the other hand, scrolling up is something I have to do all the time due to how Discourse will take you straight to the reply when you click on a notification, skipping over all the rest.
Also, that sounds far more annoying than the alternative, which is to click the Quote button at the bottom when you’re done with the post. Or, well, just scroll back up. Since I’ve been surfing the Internet for quite a while, it’s pretty intuitive to me to be able to scroll up and back down rather quickly, without losing my place.
Like I said, I don’t find it useful. Every single time I try allowing it again, I find it distracting how my eyes keep jumping over to the avatar like it’s moving on me. It has nothing else to anchor it to the page, so it doesn’t read like a static part of the page to me. It reads like something moving out of the corner of my eye. I actually referred to it as “sliding avatars” for the longest time.
I’m sure some of you like it. And it seems pretty much everyone else got used to it. But I find it distracting, and knew how to fix it. Now mobile and desktop are more consistent with each other.
It’s a thing, I guess Discourse added it a couple of months ago. It didn’t use to be there and now it is. It left a few people hornswoggled, and there was a thread about it. Now it seems normal, useful or not I’m used to it.
Or simply hover the pointer over the avatar (if you have a type of device where you can do this). Then a link appears in the status bar at the bottom of the window with the user’s name.
Well, right. I mostly use a tablet, on which hover is not really a thing.