Works, but causes CLS issues

Hi @alessiog

thank you very much for reporting this issue! We will definitely take a look at this.

But although I really appreciate your time writing a review for other users mentioning this problem, I dislike that you are not giving us a chance to look at this problem before your review.

There is no support thread or Github issue about this from you and we had no chance to look at this and maybe fix this problem. Without more information and an URL this will be not easy to debug unless we can reproduce the problem.

Antispam Bee is maintained by just a small bunch of unpaid open source people with highly fluctuating time and motivating them is not easy. Showing them a 2-star review asking (?) for help is not very motivating at all.

Performance matters and we know about the implications coming in the near future and therefore we will try to reproduce this and then try to fix this. But I want to ask you to change your behavior and start a support thread in the future before leaving a 2-star review. This will be a much better approach. Look at the support forum, we reply to everyone and there is no unresolved thread at the moment. We try to take care. Please care about us too. Thanks!

All the best
Torsten

Hi @alessiog

after a quick test I couldn’t reproduce any issues. Will try with more time later.

As you haven’t provided any URL, please check yourself with this Cumulative Layout Shift Debugger:
https://webvitals.dev/cls

It would be great if you would share your findings with us, so we can solve this issue. Especially if you write “The sidebar appears later” it looks like a theme conflict. But without knowing the theme or URL I cannot help debugging this.

All the best,
Torsten

Hi Torsten,

Thank you for your reply! Please don’t take my review in a disrespectful or attacking way. I appreciate you developing this plugin.

The main reason for writing this review is to warn other people that it might cause CLS. I didn’t think much further about it. And honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I did spend a few hours figuring out which plugin specifically caused these issues – I might as well share it with others – it might help someone. That’s what reviews are for?

I always read other reviews before downloading a plugin to see if other people encountered any issues and I do appreciate that people write them.

In my opinion, it starts to be immoral if the reviewer doesn’t change the review after the author tries to address it. I know that many reviewers do that, so those 1 star reviews definitely have a bad stigma for developers, but I won’t be that person.
Once the issue is addressed, I’ll happily turn it into a 5 star review.

Yeah, creating a support ticket or a GitHub issue first is the nicer option, and I usually try to do that.
But I don’t think it’s right to blame someone for writing a bad review immediately as well, unless the reviewer is completely unresponsive and doesn’t want to change it. This is what reviews are for.

What do you think? I’m open to change my mind.

Also, I’ll make sure to send you more detailed information about the issue tomorrow. Is this thread here fine, or do you prefer if I open a GitHub issue or a support topic?

I’m using GeneratePress as a theme. Their support told me it’s likely a plugin causing it. I did multiple tests with Antispam Bee, and every time it was enabled, the CLS shift happened. Once I disabled it, the issue disappeared.

Kind regards,

Alessio

Hi @alessiog

But I don’t think it’s right to blame someone for writing a bad review immediately as well, unless the reviewer is completely unresponsive and doesn’t want to change it.

You are right, that this is one of the reasons for reviews and of course you have all the rights to write a review first. Although I think you are not doing yourself a favor as our communication starts with a slap in the face for us. Even if you apologize afterwards (= changing the review to a higher rating) this will be a bad start.

At the moment we just know that there is a problem for you and maybe with GeneratePress and Antispam Bee. It could be just a bad combination from our approach and the theme CSS/JS. Unless we know for sure what is causing this, I think a review is the wrong choice.

Is this thread here fine, or do you prefer if I open a GitHub issue or a support topic?

There are no links allowed in reviews, therefore I think we have much better tools at hand on Github (or in the support forums).

It would be great to get the exact environment (GeneratePress Free/Premium, which modules, any Page Builder involved?) and the exact steps to reproduce the issue (Which tool are you using to get the CLS metrics?). So that we are talking about the same.

Thank you very much for any more information and insights!

All the best
Torsten

You are right, that this is one of the reasons for reviews and of course you have all the rights to write a review first. Although I think you are not doing yourself a favor as our communication starts with a slap in the face for us. Even if you apologize afterwards (= changing the review to a higher rating) this will be a bad start.

That’s true. Although I didn’t write the review to get support – when I noticed the issue, I just replaced the plugin. But you’re right, I certainly don’t want to have a bad start and make you feel bad especially when you’re trying to get to the bottom of the issue, so I’ve changed it into a 5-star review for now.

I’ll make some more tests and create a GitHub issue with further information!

Hi @alessiog

thank you very much for it! Saw the issue on Github and will try more testing to get this solved. Also thank you for the additional information. Hopefully this helps us to find the culprit part here.

All the best,
Torsten