The chat hides important elements like making a new topic in the forum. It would be more practical if it was a side bar that resizes the content left to it, so both the content and chat bar can be side by side, with no overlaying.
On the Dashboard the chat appears at the end of the page, instead of on the side. Same with Tutorials, Robots, Blogs, and News. This is also a problem because these are “endless” scrolling pages (keep loading more content as you scroll).
When I resize the browser window the content width adapts, so the chat bar would fit without problems at least in full screen. There is also a mostly blank space on the right in fullscreen.
I tried to catch the effect on the robots section, but it’s not easy to take a screenshot, as the page keeps loading as you scroll (infinite loading as mentioned above).
I tried it and it worked briefly for robots, now it has completely disappeared. Sometimes it briefly flashes at the bottom of the page.
On the forum it appears reliably on the right side (the chat remains overlayed, though).
On the other sections it appears on the bottom of the page, but not on the right side of the page.
I noticed also that in the tutorial section, that when I reach the last page, no chat window is appended at the bottom.
Interestingly, after a hard refresh, I can click on next and prev. Then if I go to another page, and click on tutorials again, I have infinite scrolling again.
Sometimes the chat window pops up while loading (at the bottom of the page), then disappears again as the page fully loads.
On the dashboard the same happened, just now, even if there is no infinite page scrolling/loading: the chat window appears briefly at the bottom of the page, then disappears.
Somehow the forum and other parts of the site seem to be different. So far the forum always works reliably.
P.S.: In case it helps, I have Firefox 62.0 64bit Windows 8.1. I have AdBlock Plus installed, but deactivated it to see if it makes a difference, but it remained the same.
Edit: I tested it in fullscreen mode (no title bars etc.), to see if the amount of vertical space makes a difference, but it did not.
I checked the debugger of Firefox, it says for the forum:
request failed with status 404
https://www.robotshop.com/assets/_ember_jquery-27e777857b8c0730dacfe09cb11711365d21a5db4f9ee0b85d494e4259cf6cda.js
Other error messages I encoutered when loading with the Firefox debugger enabled (Robots page):
Speicherverbrauch von “will-change” ist zu hoch. Die Budget-Grenze ist die Fläche des Dokuments multipliziert mit 3 (247246 px). Vorkommen von “will-change”, die das Budget überschreiten, werden ignoriert.
The translation is roughly:
Will-change memory consumption is too high. Budget limit is the document surface area multiplied by 3 (247246 px). Occurrences of will-change over the budget will be ignored.
Synchrone XMLHttpRequests am Haupt-Thread sollte nicht mehr verwendet werden, weil es nachteilige Effekte für das Erlebnis der Endbenutzer hat. Für weitere Hilfe siehe http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/ dependencies
Translation:
Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to the end user’s experience. For more help, check http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/.
This bug is almost fixed now, with the recent layout changes.
There is just a minor problem remaining. The space on the right for the chat window is always reserved when you opened it (as expected). The first time I went on the http://letsmakerobots.com/ page, and clicked through the categories on the top (dashboard, forums, tutorials, etc.) it worked fine and kept showing the chat window on the right.
The next times only the forum still showed the chat, though the space on the right was still reserved as it should.
What I saw was that the page would scroll down quickly, at the bottom the chat window would appear (eventhough the right side space was still free as it should), then the chat disappeared again. The reserved space for the chat on the right side of the window stayed there as it should, all the time.
For the forum category it works as it should, always.
Thanks again for your work.