@Shog9 the hover's appearance is entirely css at the moment; is this a common problem?

@Shog9 Yes, that's more or less how it works [maybe except for the "simply" part :) -- there are quite a few edge cases to be considered, and not all of them are yet handled correctly]

@devinb is correct, though -- since there's no way to know if your mouse cursor is over a message just because it happens to be there or because you actually want to reply, stopping the scrolling on hover-over-message would have a serious undesired side effect

in particular, because there's another thing that happens when the autoscroll is stopped:

ususally, the chat screen only contains the last 100 messages; if a new one appears on the bottom, the top one is removed

however, if autoscrolling is off because you're not on the bottom, this does not happen

the assumption is that when you're scrolling up, you want to read up on what happened previously

and it's annoying when the top messages disappear while you do that; we've seen that in the early days of using the chat internally

so stopping the autoscroll on mouse hover would mean that just because of the cursor position, your browsers memory fills up with chat messages

what I can imagine doing is this:

while you're replying to another message, we can highlight this message in some way or the other

that way, you can immediately see that you clicked the wrong reply button by accident and simply correct your mistake

how does that sound?

Perhaps the same sone way we use when hovering on the reply marker :)

@balpha It might make corrections happen slightly sooner, but doesn't really avoid the problem; if messages are coming in fast, I might just hit the wrong reply button again...

Was thinking about this last night, and if no one else is complaining about it then you probably shouldn't bother. My problem comes down to fast typing and slow mousing: the context switch doesn't enable the kind of focus and accuracy that I need to hit those tiny little buttons in a reasonable amount of time (defined as whatever the update frequency for the forum is).

...so I see the position of the message, and aim for the bottom-right corner, but by the time I've targeted a specific button the next update hits. I assume other people have a better strategy for this: perhaps it just takes time to learn, like log-rolling or something.

Any way... I've decided to just wait for this thing to stabilize a bit and then use Greasemonkey to add keyboard support. That way, I can skip the whole "switch to mouse" part of the game and avoid the problem entirely.

@Shog9 I've made both mistakes you're describing, if that helps you're argument -- I've clicked the wrong reply link and starred the wrong post