General chat scroll

OGS Development
1

I think there used to be a automatic scroll to the bottom of the chat (to the newest message) each time a new message was posted on the chat.
It was pain to read the backlog with all that automatic scrolling down happening. Now the system never forces a scroll down if a user has scrolled up. It is easy to accidentally scroll with mouse wheel and not notice it. Then after a while you start to wonder why there are no new messages on the chat.
I think there could be a timer on the automatic scroll. It would always automatically scroll you to the latest message unless you just scrolled up in the last 30-60 seconds (I donā€™t know what the perfect timer would be). That way one could scroll up to read the backlog and not get scrolled back down constantly but it would also scroll down to the last message after a while.

Edit: Oh and this functionality should be in game windows and chat window

4 Likes
2

Yes, please!

Iā€™ve had it in games that my opponents and I didnā€™t realize that the other had replied to sth.

Grtz, Tom

3

Rather than a timer I think it would be nice to have some visual indicator (an arrow, or a colored 1-pixel-tall line at the bottom, perhaps) when a new message arrives while I am scrolled up.

3 Likes
4

Or there could be a little button that when pressed disables chat auto-scroll while you are reading the back-log of messages (I seem to remember seeing this on some chess site client, though I donā€™t know how big of a hassle it would be to implement here). :thought_balloon:

5

Huh, yeah it should be scrolling down automatically now, it is for me at any rate. Can you guys hold down shift while reloading the page and see if itā€™s then working for you?

Your idea about having a 30/60s timer that scrolls down if you left the chat scrolled up is pretty interesting, i like that iā€™ll add it to the backlog.

6

Yeah, I think there was a fics client years back that had a button that lit up different colours. For example, white if autoscrolling is toggled, green if toggled off, stopping autoscrolling, and switching from green to red if there was a new chat while autoscrolling was off. Another nifty thing was you could leave autoscrolling off, zip to the bottom of the chat, and itā€™d turn green again, too.:slight_smile:

1 Like
8

I think it was BabaChess but Iā€™m not sure (been a loooong time since I played there)! smile

9

another very minor differenceā€¦in the old server if I came back to the chat after a while I would often refresh the page to get rid of all the game announcements (as an aside maybe they dont really belong in chat any longer)

this would ā€˜garbage collectā€™ all the stale accouncements, let me see the chat and place all the active requests at the bottom

the new server does the same thing, except that the active requests go at the top, where I canā€™t really see them

10

Its very very very annoying that when you are reading backlog of the chat, it snaps back to bottom as soon as there is a game-offer or gam-estarted-notifcation (it doesnt go down if its just a chat-line)

Would it be hard to make it NOT jump down to bottom if scrollback isnt all the way down? that way one can read backlog without the frustration

1 Like
11

Simple solution -
most recent comment first, at top of list rather than at the bottom.
where they are (often) missed

12

This would go against majority of UI design. Most (if not all) shells and command lines put new messages on bottom. It would make no sense to change the paradigm now.

2 Likes
13

I donā€™t know if this is the issue OGS is having, but Iā€™ve seen autoscroll issues before that were related to HiDPI / Retina displays, when the CSS ā€œdevice pixel ratioā€ is not 1.0 (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8785643/what-exactly-is-device-pixel-ratio). Then it seems like sometimes you can have a scroll position thatā€™s a half-pixel, which makes a naive check for ā€œare we scrolled to the bottomā€ fail.

1 Like