Bug with hidden excerpts or Expand macro adding too much height to pages

[Morgan Wowk]

Bug

Using hidden excerpts on your page, in this case at the bottom of the page, adds hidden height to the page and causes a long scroll for the sum height of all your hidden excerpts.

EDIT:

Upon further testing, it may be more related to the use of the Expand macro with lengthy content rather than the use of excerpts. My use case is Expand macros that contain lengthy excerpt include macros.

EDIT 2: 

The bug seems to occur only after publishing the page. If you did a hard refresh the bug would not occur. Meaning, there is some correlation between Expand macros and the height of the page after publishing.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create several lengthy excerpts at the bottom of your page. For each excerpt, marking it as hidden and giving them distinct names.
2. Publish the page. Re-edit the page. Add a couple "Excerpt include" macros at the top of the page inside of an Expand macro. Referencing the same excerpts you just created.
3. Publish the page.
4. You will see a big empty space and lots of scrolling distance below the comment section.

Root cause analysis

When using hidden excerpts it appears that the #comment-container div gets a calculated height to it that is longer than it should be. I theorize that there is some frontend logic for calculating height of the comment block that is not taking into account hidden excerpts. EDIT: It may be more related to the use of Expand macro and not excerpts. It's hard to say. When you close an Expand macro, I notice the height at the bottom of the page increases. When I open all my expand macros, the height is proper at the bottom of the page. EDIT 2: It is further narrowed down to the use of Expand macros only after just publishing the page. When the accordions are open, the height is broken. When they are closed, the height is proper - after publishing.

[Bill Bailey]

Hello @game-of-morgan , well if you were on the Server/DC version, you could fix this issue yourself by updating the CSS. Unfortunately, that is not support for the Cloud version. And normally, I would tell you to file a bug, but I think that is not an option for you while you are on the free version? I did not see any open bugs.

So your hope is that this impacts enough people that a bug can be raises.

Is there any reason you are referencing the excerpts on the same page as you have them defined? That is not a typical use case.

[Morgan Wowk]

Thanks for your quick reply, Bill. Really appreciate it.

You've nailed it regarding my degree of customization and support. In actuality though, I work within an organization that uses Confluence (could be the hosted version ). In that organization I have been working on some documentation and came across this issue that left my pages somewhat...glitchy.

So it's the weekend and after learning that I could not issue a support request myself I've gone the only route available at this moment which is the community. With like you said, the hopes that the right person will see it or the right amount of people will find this issue relatable.

---

Regarding the use of excerpts on the same page, the use case I'm going for is building a document that has multiple possible paths for a reader to go down. Two paths to be specific.

One path has a 4 step process for getting set up with a development environment in our tech firm.

The second path is a 6 step process for getting set up with a development environment with some slight differences.

Between the two paths, there are several "steps" that are shared. For that reason, I found the excerpts to be perfect. I could write the excerpts for the duplicated content at the bottom of the page and use those excerpts as needed in various places of the visible document. The result is the editor modifies the shared content in one place without running the risk of one path being modified without the other later on.

Here's how it looks:

[Bill Bailey]

I have been a user of the multi-except plugin (paid) on server for years. On Cloud they have updated the excerpt to function more like that plugin.

How I used it, was to create a page in the space at root level with the name "!includes" so it floats to the top (and at root so it does not show up in the nav). Then placed all of my named excerpts on that page. Now all my excerpts are in one place for easy maintenance. 

Would that work in your case?

[Morgan Wowk]

It sounds like a plugin I should look at! Could be something there.

The specific use of !includes at the root probably wouldn't work. The space consists of ~200 pages, some deeply nested. These excerpts I want scoped to one page specifically / editable in the same area. For the case of re-using content within a single article, I think having the excerpts / re-used content as close to the visible content as possible is just important for the next person to come along without any prior knowledge and make edits

[Morgan Wowk]

I will check out multi-excerpt to see what its got. Thank you!

[Morgan Wowk]

Is anyone else able to confirm if they can reproduce the same issue?