Professional Ghost Mode!

August 1, 2015 4:18 AM

Is it me or has the CSS magically turned all links transparent?

This is kind of cool and it's sort of newly engaging and interesting to browse MeFi this way, but unless a subset of the CSS is on a union-endorsed strike, I'm guessing this isn't planned and we maybe don't want to keep this pony.

posted by DarlingBri to Bugs at 4:18 AM (16 comments total)

Hey, it's wee hours of the morn for pb, so he will have a look as soon as he can, but in the meantime, maybe we can see if anyone else is having this problem. Things look fine to me on a couple of different browsers / computers.

Just to cover a couple of things: I'm assuming you aren't seeing this on any other sites, DarlingBri. What browser and platform are you using? Have you tried logging out and back in, and/or disabling plugins or extensions?
posted by taz (staff) at 4:23 AM on August 1, 2015

I'm not getting it myself. Does it happen to you in private browsing mode as well?
posted by ignignokt at 5:04 AM on August 1, 2015

Yeah, I can confirm that this isn't part of a plan or recent change on our end. My first thought is that you might have a misbehaving browser add-on, Stylish style, or Greasemonkey script. If you have another browser handy you might just verify that you're not getting the same thing there. That will at least narrow the problem down to an issue with your main browser.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:42 AM on August 1, 2015

That unread MeMail is making my eyelid twitch. Even when the text is hidden.
posted by grouse at 5:44 AM on August 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Taking another look at your screenshot I can see that the problem is with bolded text. If you changed the Body Font in your MetaFilter preferences recently it could indicate a problem with bold text in that font on your system. It still could be a browser add-on causing problems with bold text, but the font could be another place to troubleshoot.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:55 AM on August 1, 2015

This happens to me on the regular. Nothing short of closing and reopening Chrome fixes it. I assumed it was some extension I have installed, and so said nothing. I have never seen it on any other browser, but I don't use any other browser, so I'm no use to you there.
posted by Sternmeyer at 6:12 AM on August 1, 2015

Ghost Mode sounds like some government issued extension only given to spies and special agents, and it turns pages into top secret madlibs wherein your next mission isn't revealed until the blanks are filled in at the end of the departmental fondue party.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:38 AM on August 1, 2015

grouse- you wouldn't want to click on this, then.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:28 AM on August 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

grouse- you wouldn't want to click on this, then.

Aaaaah!
posted by grouse at 7:47 AM on August 1, 2015

Oh. I had this problem. I was able to fix it by                                                       . It was pretty easy. HTH.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:54 AM on August 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

Off topic: has anyone had a problem with cut & paste from URLs in threads older then 2 days?
posted by clavdivs at 9:35 AM on August 1, 2015

This happens to me on the regular. Nothing short of closing and reopening Chrome fixes it. I assumed it was some extension I have installed, and so said nothing.

Ha. I had never encountered this before. It fixed itself at random as I valiantly carried on browsing MeFi, blind and staggering from ghost link to ghost link. It was kind of fun, I actually have no extensions or plugins on Chrome here, so I doubted it was an issue on my end and figured it was a style sheet delivery failure.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:39 AM on August 1, 2015

grouse- you wouldn't want to click on this, then.

what kind of monster are you
posted by threeants at 1:45 PM on August 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

joseph conrad is fully awesome: "grouse- you wouldn't want to click on this, then."

Please tell me 320 of those are "your post is live" notifications.
posted by double block and bleed at 3:00 PM on August 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

I assumed it was some extension I have installed, and so said nothing.

Because I was not a Chrome extension. Then they came for the Greasemonkey scripts...
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:07 PM on August 2, 2015

When I've seen this kind of text rendering bug it's been on Firefox. Used to happen a lot before Mozilla got its hardware-assisted rendering sorted out. Perhaps your instance of Chrome is not playing nice with your graphics card driver?

Does Chrome even have the ability to turn hardware-assisted rendering off any more? If so, that might be a thing worth trying.
posted by flabdablet at 8:16 AM on August 3, 2015