I appreciate that each of us are creatures of habit and perhaps this perceived problem is due to a habit I have picked up for interfacing with Wikia's Monaco sidebar navigation menu. Any help or advice is appreciated.

The problem is this:

• Items in the navigation sidebar that auto-expand on mouse hover now cause subsequent items in that menu list to get pushed down the page to accommodate/display a sub-menu list of items. The same problem reoccurs for subsequent levels in the hierarchy of those expanding menus. This makes it quite difficult to navigate to some menu items that are lower down in the list and/or deeper in the navigation hierarchy because as your mouse leaves the last item of an expanded sublist the position of menu items in the original list revert to their original placement and of course that means that your mouse cursor is suddenly over a different place in the navigation sidebar.
• Try navigating to the Top Content > {third item in that sublist}. If you are like me then the auto-expansion of one of the first two items in that sub-list interferes with your ability to place the mouse cursor over the third item being targeted.

  If your wiki doesn't have that menu item then try this at w:c:vsk. The third item in that wiki's Top Content sub-menu is labeled Highest Voted. An even more challenging wiki is w:c:rappelz because the navigation hierarchy at that wiki has several levels in some cases. (I imagine this is common for game wikis.)

I think the problem can be most easily fixed by tweaking the delay before the mouse hover action causes auto-expansion.

• Where is that tweak possible?

I suggest that an even better fix would be to make the active area for triggering auto-expansion narrower so that the mouse cursor can be moved down (and up) an expanded list without any on-mouse-hover action being triggered. (Maybe the leftmost 25-33% of the menu width.)

• This is a little more like the UI we had when those expanding sublists were cascading menus and offset to the right by 10-20% of the menu width.

Does anybody else find this navigation sidebar UI challenging or is it just me?

Is there a clever method/technique for trouble free navigation?

Thank you for considering this request.
-- najevi 01:29, August 7, 2010 (UTC)

I don't experience the problem you mention. Maybe it's your mouse settings?

Besides, this is likely not something any non-Wikia staff person can address. I recommend Special:Contact. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:23 PM PST 6 Aug 2010

Today I noticed that the original "cascading menu" style expansion behaviour is restored so the problem that I described above is no more.

-- najevi 01:48, August 22, 2010 (UTC)