Extra-long words for an extra-wide screen

August 10, 2008 7:00 AM

When a title (or possible any word) in a contact's post is long enough, it overflows the bounds of the sidebar and causes the front page to have right-scroll. Pic here.
posted by ChrisR to Bugs at 7:00 AM (23 comments total)

omgthisisliketheworstthingeveri'llprobablykillmyselfbecauseidon'tknowhowtodealwithit.howcanipossiblydealwithafrontpagerightscrollthatisbig.
posted by tellurian at 8:01 AM on August 10, 2008

That probably didn't help. Sorry.
posted by tellurian at 8:03 AM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'll say. Bug reports come in all sizes. Supposing, as is the case for me, that a use has few contacts that post; I'll be seeing this right-scroll for about 5 months, if the last post on my sidebar is to be believed.
posted by ChrisR at 8:16 AM on August 10, 2008

(Don't worry, I'm not offended)
posted by ChrisR at 8:16 AM on August 10, 2008

overflow: hidden; might fix it.
posted by Artw at 8:22 AM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

I just had that happen when one of my contacts added a contact with a loooooong user name. It doesn't really bother me, it's just visually jarring.

If yours is bothering you, you can click to hide the contact activity sidebar and then unhide it periodically to check to see if the scroll-inducing entry is off the page yet.
posted by amyms at 8:22 AM on August 10, 2008

Or, send your contact a scathing MeFiMail telling them to cut it out with the long titles in the future.
posted by amyms at 8:24 AM on August 10, 2008

OTOH, I appreciate that the structure of the Meta-sites cope with resizing. Very handy when several windows are open. (Is it necessary to add that sometimes the meta-sites benefit from open windows?)
posted by Cranberry at 9:19 AM on August 10, 2008

I threw some spaces into long words and that should help everything wrap.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:37 AM on August 10, 2008

And I thought I was just being clever. Turns out that I was in fact being annoying.

Hard to tell the difference, sometimes.
posted by vernondalhart at 9:41 AM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

pb, I approve; it's an elegant hack, economical and minimal. Thanks. Larry Wall would be proud!
posted by ChrisR at 10:53 AM on August 10, 2008

tellurian writes "omgthisisliketheworstthingeveri'llprobablykillmyselfbecauseidon'tknowhowtodealwithit.howcanipossiblydealwithafrontpagerightscrollthatisbig."

Yet another way metafilter is better than phpbb, long unbroken text doesn't horizontally scroll the whole page.
posted by Mitheral at 12:09 PM on August 10, 2008

hack metafilter!
posted by krautland at 12:54 PM on August 10, 2008

This might be useful.

What percentage of HTML coders know the wbr tag exists?
posted by null terminated at 2:10 PM on August 10, 2008 [2 favorites]

I blame Microsoft.
posted by clearly at 4:17 PM on August 10, 2008

I dedicate this thread to the memory of klerck.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:26 PM on August 10, 2008

(I didn't mean to imply that developers should know about the wbr tag, just that it's a interesting, esoteric tag that would be perfect if browsers implemented it correctly)
posted by null terminated at 9:54 PM on August 10, 2008

null terminated: "(I didn't mean to imply that developers should know about the wbr tag, just that it's a interesting, esoteric tag that would be perfect if browsers implemented it correctly)"

Meh. Say it worked perfectly on all browsers. In that case, either the poster (or commenter) would have to know about it and when to use it and care enough to use it in those cases, or mathowie/pb would have to put some sort of logic into MeFi to insert them into long words. Whatever logic they came up with would almost certainly be less efficient than something built into browsers that knew font sizes and localizations and screen/window dimensions.

And that is exactly why CSS3 will have word-wrap: break-word.
posted by Plutor at 6:34 AM on August 11, 2008

Plutor: You are correct, as usual.
posted by null terminated at 8:40 AM on August 11, 2008

I just want

text-decoration: lolcat; 
margin: -looklikeshit;
background-color: professionalwhite

posted by cowbellemoo at 9:54 AM on August 11, 2008

Oh man, this reminds me that when I click on metatalk from the front page* the little hyperlink box around "Metatalk" causes the side scrolling bar to appear at the bottom. This is in both Firefox 1.something and 2.something (at home and at work). The side scroller goes away when I click elsewhere on the page and the box around Metatalk disappears.

*I've come to realize I use metafilter as a portal. I have metafilter on my bookmarks bar, but I use the mefi front page to click to the subsites. Metafilter is like yahoo to me. :P
posted by frecklefaerie at 11:34 AM on August 11, 2008

> overflow: hidden; might fix it.

overflow:scroll will fix it, and none of the text will disappear.
posted by ardgedee at 12:46 PM on August 11, 2008

overflow: auto would be even better, since scroll forces scrollbars to appear even if they aren't necessary.
posted by Plutor at 4:39 AM on August 12, 2008