Tweak hover-over card

Short version: the “card” that appears when one hovers (in the stream) over a post author’s name or image tends to obscure view of the post itself. Could we alter the way these cards appear, so that they are less intrusive?

Longer version: This is probably a new feature, as I’ve only started noticing it. I think it is a useful feature, as it allows one to follow the post author (e.g. if the post has been reshared). However, they get triggered much too often (mostly when I am moving the mouse to click on a link in the post… the card pops up and obscures the link), and are currently a bit of an annoyance – I find myself waiting for them to go away, or clicking elsewhere to make them go away, before being able to read the post.

Several solutions:

  1. make the cards only appear for post-authors one does not already follow. (This is when they’re most useful to me: someone I follow reshares something, and I want to follow the original author.)
  2. make the cards appear in a particular place (e.g. over the left-hand menu rather than over the stream? – although this does have the disadvantage of obscuring the left-hand menu!)
  3. make the cards appear only when one hovers over the post-author’s name, rather than when one hovers over the post-author’s name OR image. This would reduce the likelihood of the card popping up when one is simply moving the mouse to click on something in the post.

An alternative might be to not have such cards popping up and instead have an extra button (next to the “Ignore” and “Hide” buttons in the top right hand corner of each post) which would allow one to add the post author/manage which aspect they are in. This is the main point (as I see it) of the cards, so if implemented would remove the need for constantly-popping-up cards. The secondary functionalities such as allowing one to see the post-author’s followed tags aren’t so important – one could find out that information by clicking through to their page. (But I appreciate this is more controversial.)

What do you think?


Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

Hovercards have been around for a while. However, with the release of 0.3.0.0, one of the changes in the code made hovercards pop up far to quickly, and not disappear when they should. This will be fixed as soon as possible.

See https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4716 and https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4730, as well as other fixes which are being made for hovercards, such as https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/4758, https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4693 and https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4228 (among others).

What I mean to say is: wait until the fixes for the problem introduced with 0.3.0.0 have been implemented, and then see if you still find hovercards a problem. If so, then it might be worth considering some of your proposals. But I suspect you might find that hovercards are no longer a problem for you once their behaviour has been fixed. The fact that you hadn’t even noticed their existence until the bug was introduced suggests that!

Brilliant. Thanks Goob. I should have gone looking in GitHub first.

I think returning to a slower pop-up time would likely solve my issue. All my suggestions came from finding their rapid-popping-up an annoyance, rather than just wanting those features.

(I think, on reflection, I was aware of their existence before. I just didn’t guess the pop-up time had been altered, so assumed I was making the memory up.)

limiting the active zone might help; but yes, bothersome