Clicking on quoted post - target link is inaccurate

[AZhappyjack]

Why is it when I click on the little arrow in a quotes post that it NEVER takes me back to the quoted post? It's always one or two posts off, and not always in the same direction. It's annoying as all get out... can't this be fixed so that clicking on the "refer-back" could actually take you to that post? I mean, it's not rocket science, is it?

 

[WildCowboy]

The usual cause for that is that the anchor jumps to the proper spot, but then some late-loading content pops in and moves the scroll position of the page, but I'm not seeing that in my testing.

 

[chown33]

This happens for me with an older Firefox on an older Mac. You didn't state your browser, os, or platform versions, so comparisons may be inexact.

I see this happen regularly when there are images in posts. The images start out unloaded, and so take no space. Then when they load, it changes the page layout and scrolls the post I wanted to see completely out of view.

All it takes is one image in a post above the target post on the page. It's much worse with multiple images, because each one increases the "navigational error", until eventually, even though you started out with a heading for San Diego bay, you end up somewhere north of San Francisco bay.

In threads without images, it works fine for me. I don't recall ever seeing a problem. Try it with some threads here in Site & Forum Feedback.

 

[AZhappyjack]

This happens for me with an older Firefox on an older Mac. You didn't state your browser, os, or platform versions, so comparisons may be inexact.

I see this happen regularly when there are images in posts. The images start out unloaded, and so take no space. Then when they load, it changes the page layout and scrolls the post I wanted to see completely out of view.

All it takes is one image in a post above the target post on the page. It's much worse with multiple images, because each one increases the "navigational error", until eventually, even though you started out with a heading for San Diego bay, you end up somewhere north of San Francisco bay.

In threads without images, it works fine for me. I don't recall ever seeing a problem. Try it with some threads here in Site & Forum Feedback.

Running macOS Monterey (12.6) ... it happens with Safari (Version 16.0 (17614.1.25.9.10, 17614) and Chrome (Version 105.0.5195.125 (Official Build) (arm64))

What's the point of a link to a location that (apparently) is 100% wrong? If I wanted to hunt for the original post, I would not click the link... I'd just start scrolling back...

 

[WildCowboy]

Yeah, remotely hosted images are the most likely culprit. Ads can sometimes do it, but you can usually account for that in website code by holding a space for the known ad size even before it shows up. But with other remotely hosted images like photos, it can't account for their sizes until they're loaded in, which can be after the browser has already jumped to the anchor.

Test with threads with and without lots of images (images hosted externally vs. on our servers may behave differently, not sure) and you should see a difference. Unfortunately, it's a common issue on forums and I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it.