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Stop showing profiles on hover?


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Call me picky but how about this annoying situation:  You click on a forum topic with your mouse/pointer and up comes the post(s).  You start to read it but you left your pointer where it was and Voila - JS has detected that I am inadvertently hovering over the profile/avatar of the topic's poster.  Now I have to remove that window with some action.  

This happens so much that I have to ask - can this "hover" response be changed to look for a click instead?  Do we really need to see this information when we didn't really ask for it?

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2 hours ago, ginerjm said:

You click on a forum topic with your mouse/pointer and up comes the post(s).  You start to read it but you left your pointer where it was and Voila - JS has detected that I am inadvertently hovering over the profile/avatar of the topic's poster.

Sorry, I read your post incorrectly. I could see how that would be annoying. Moving the mouse to hide "popup" content seems to be par for the course when it comes to browsing the Web. I guess I've just gotten used to it.

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44 minutes ago, requinix said:

The change would be that clicking (with Javascript enabled) does the popup instead.

It seems like that could lead to some confusion. There's nothing obvious in the popup for getting to the user's profile. Perhaps that something that can be changed. If someone clicks a username to bring up the popup, I don't know if visitors will think to click the username again to view the profile.

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30 minutes ago, cyberRobot said:

It seems like that could lead to some confusion. There's nothing obvious in the popup for getting to the user's profile.

It's not obvious that the username in the post has some sort of action, either. It's black in color with no underlines or styling. The "Posted" date is a link too - the link to go directly to a post. Frankly I don't like the overly unintrusive "this is a link but make sure the user can't tell by looking at it" approach currently common to web design - I know when I design something that has occasional links among lots of plain text, I underline to make it clear there's something there.

off-topic edit: the "it's a link but you can't tell" reminds me of a '90s RPG series of games where you could talk with NPCs, and the way to "navigate" through dialog was to click on words. Like, the NPC would say "There's a box over in the corner", where "box" and "corner" would lead into the next response. But they weren't styled differently so you couldn't just scan the text for where to go next. Had to actually read and guess what to talk about. Still some of my favorite games ever, and occasionally I think about setting up DOSBox or a Windows 98 emulator to play them.
then a few years later they remade them with a new engine in 3D... just wasn't the same...

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33 minutes ago, requinix said:

Frankly I don't like the overly unintrusive "this is a link but make sure the user can't tell by looking at it" approach currently common to web design - I know when I design something that has occasional links among lots of plain text, I underline to make it clear there's something there.

I'm right there with you. I understand the impulse to style links so they fit with the design or don't stand out too much. Especially when dealing with pages that contain a lot of links. However, I'm still in the boat where links should be underlined, for the most part. Of course, I make exceptions for things like the website navigation and text designed to look like a button.

A benefit of using underlines, besides the easy recognition for most website visitors, is that it helps people who have difficulties perceiving color. In case anyone reads this and is interested, more information can be found here:
https://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/link_text#appearance

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Yeah, after disabling the main a { text-decoration:none } pages seem alright. Some oddities, like sometimes link text includes spaces so it looks like  Home  instead of Home, and unfortunately the rule is on a and not a[href] or a:link so it does catch some non-links (and besides, there are some non-links that have href=# so that's already an annoyance). And some minor things that probably don't matter have their own overrides.

Something to think about. Meanwhile the user popup thing should be fine to do, doesn't seem like there will be any problem with it.

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