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Copy Link pop up can be completely off screen
The “Copy Link” button below each post has been changed so that it now has a pop up offering either a raw link or a Markdown link:
This always appears just below the button, even when the length of the post or the scroll position means that the button is at the bottom of the window. This means the pop up can be completely off screen. This can be confusing for a user who does not know to expect a pop up, as they may think the link has now been copied to the clipboard, until they try to paste it somewhere and find that it doesn’t work. This could affect a user who is new to Codidact, or an existing user who is accustomed to the old button that had no pop up.
Could the pop up be made sensitive to the window position, in the same way that browser builtin drop down boxes are (they appear below when there is room, or otherwise above)?
Note that some of the other buttons also have this behaviour, so a fix should probably be applied to all of them together.
1 answer
The challenge with making modals appear above if there's not room below is that they might then cover important content. If this happened to the Flag modal, for example, it might cover most of the post, which might make writing a custom flag harder. I think we probably want at least the post modals to all behave the same way; it would be confusing if Copy Link did one thing and Flag or Close did another.
Taking all of that into account, what is the best behavior? I don't know if it's possible in Ruby (or HTML for that matter), but one possibility that occurs to me is to leave the page content as it is but scroll the page a little so you see that there's a modal there. Would that help or would that be jarring? If that's a bad idea (or not possible), what else would work from a usability perspective?
From a suggestion in comments: maybe we could move the modal to the side so its presence is still clear -- probably doesn't work for flags on a phone (too wide), but seems like it would work for Copy Link:
(Personally, I think I still prefer scrolling the page a little, as it would work with all modals, but I don't know how hard that is.)
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