Help Find Member field is hijacking my cursor

[tick talk]

While I'm typing away in the dialogue box, my cursor suddenly pops over to the Find Member field. Seems to happen at regular intervals, perhaps during page refresh or save.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

You do mean the Find Member tool in the right sidebar, just below the J&H ad in the screenshot, right?

Are you using an iPad? Are you holding it in your hands?

 

[roughbarked]

Definitely hitting a wrong key combination.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

When my wife is typing on her ipad and holding it in her hands, she sometimes puts her finger on an active control near the right side.

 

[T.Cu]

When my wife is typing on her ipad and holding it in her hands, she sometimes puts her finger on an active control near the right side.


Hello All, NO, this is a real thing. It has been happening to me too, and I have emailed the webmasters about it a while back.
On an Imac, using Safari, you go to type a reply to a post and as soon as you hit enter, the cursor and all your successive typing ends up in the "Find a Member" box. (It might also happen when your typing goes down to the next line, I'll have to look again sometime.)
I have forgotten exactly what causes it, because I have it under control. It happens, I figured out, if your browser window is not spread all across your desktop, if you keep it smaller, the problem happens again.
The window has to be open wide all the way, with the right margin at least past the "search" magnifying glass on that top blue menu bar, or this happens.

Thanks for bringing it up Ticktalk, glad I am not the only one to whom this was happening. Tim

 

[roughbarked]

Ok I'm on an iMac in Safari. So what is wrong?
Not seeming to be able to replicate the problem.
Except that I ban googletagmanager from all my browsers. Maybe that's it. I was getting crosscripting from google.

 

[tick talk]

I'm on a Mac and typing away in the dialogue box to reply to a thread and my cursor keeps jumping over to the Find Member tool at the right margin. It wants to autofill my name so perhaps the issue is related to the Mac's password tool which autofills the sign-in box. FWIW, this is the only site I've had that happen.

 

[Jim Haney]

Yes, You are correct. If everything was set up correctly your name would already be in the box, sounds like it is trying to fill the box with your name and can't for WHATEVER reason or reasons......

 

[Tom McIntyre]

I don't think Tick Talk's name should be in the Find Member box. It should remain blank. It sounds to me like his Mac has autofill enabled at the system level or at least a setting in Safari.

It is probably in a security setting for auto login. I won't have time to track it down right now, but perhaps someone else who has a Mac could play with their settings and see if they can duplicate the problem.

That is the only input field we leave open but I kind of find it useful. It might be possible to make Find Member a drop down which should keep the input field from displaying until it was clicked.

 

[T.Cu]

"but perhaps someone else who has a Mac could play with their settings and see if they can duplicate the problem."

Hi Tom, see my previous post in this thread, and also my previous query about it to the site a few months back. (I can't find that query, but maybe you can.)
It describes this same problem and also how I prevent it, in more detail than my previous post in this thread. Although the "fix" I mention above in this thread is the pith of it. Thanks for your attention, Tim

 

[roughbarked]

I did play with it and had no problem. I did hit a few other control type keys to see if it changed but no. However, my browsers have all the autofill type settings set to off.
If the computer has a tracking pad rather than a mouse, these can interfere if the hand or arm goes across them.

 

[T.Cu]

Hi Everyone,
I am using Safari and Chrome, desktop mac, Mojave, Apple keyboard.

Go to the "reply to a thread" box at the bottom of a thread.

You have to do this with the page at about half screen-width, as I said before, so that the magnifying glass and "support us" parts are not showing on the upper right of the blue menu bar.

Try typing a response, then at some point, wanting to go to the next line, or cause a space to occur between lines, try hitting the "tab" key and continue typing. In Safari, the cursor shoots over to "Find Member Box" and your typing continues there.

In Chrome, there's a twist to this, your typing after hitting tab key just doesn't show up at all, that I can find.

And there is another strange thing on this page too, the drop-down menus that are supposed to be under "Forums" or "Events" and the others, which appear when you hover over these headings, on the blue bar, will not appear if the page is drawn in on the right, to make the site a smaller page.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread and the other one about this quirk, the page seems to need to be open on the right at least to where the magnifier icon is, on the top right of the blue bar, to work correctly. My work-around is fine for me, which is to have the page open wider on the right than I usually would have it, but it is a strange thing to have happen.

The two menus on top of the page, (gray smaller, blue larger) do not contract at the same rate (or with the same success, apparently) as the page is narrowed laterally, from the right side. So whereas the gray menu contracts appropriately, and all words stay visible, the blue menu is seemingly "left behind" and certain aspects are cut off, like the magnifier. It seems that when this happens the page acts funny. Seems like a spacing or formatting thing. Letter sizes maybe. Heading sizes. Something like that is my guess.
And it's really a guess, as I do not know what's causing it, I'm not a computer guy, but it is still happening as of today. I am going to try to let the computer savvy people figure it out when they have time.

 

[roughbarked]

Why do you need to hit the Tab key?

I can confirm that it doesn't matter what size the window the Tab key will take you to find a member.

When the page is drawn from the right as you say the word links become icons and don't pop down but do work when you click on them.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Computers are flexible so that users may pursue their own vision of the material they are using. The problem is that the world is moving away from desktop systems and almost all new software adopts the "mobile first" display strategy.

The software tries to create a meaningful display that works for a range of device sizes. These changes are not merely scaling since it may involve rearranging related windows and changing links to other formats to save space.

Most traditional desktop software does not try to be mobile friendly and just scales or deploys scroll bars.

Mobile devices are also touch sensitive and may not have a pointing device associated with them at all. For example my iPhone uses the image of the space bar in the onscreen keyboard to provide a cursor to act within a line of text.

When compromises are needed the decision leans toward the mobile devices because that is the trend in the market.

Our community is a bit older than the average age of Internet users but even this community is 60% mobile device users.

Would someone who uses multiple open windows like to describe how they use them? Perhaps that would yield some insights on how we could better accommodate their usage.

On the other side of this problem space, there may be some who prefer to use dictation on their phone or pad and rarely use the keyboard at all. I would also be interested in their views of how the experience could be improved.

 

[roughbarked]

I'm in the minority.
I have a phone but no way do I use it for the internet.

The young people will all get old eyes too one day. It will be lamentable if they can't get a screen they can see.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

I am 84 and have had vision problems since I was 6 years old. I prefer to use my HP Pavilion but I am comfortable with my wife's iPAD Air and use my iPhone 6s+ sometimes. I spend time enlarging screens and shrinking them to improve readability or scope of content.

My wife also has an iMac 20 that she still uses but she seems to prefer the Air. Her iPhone 8 is difficult for her to use for interactive tasks, but she does handle our children's and grandchildren's text messages and FaceBook. I suspect if we had gotten the Air with telephone support she would be using it almost exclusively.