Settings/invites flashing (URL being flipping)

In this thread, @abhijeetbodas2001 talks about a weird bug in the UI, which can be reproduced by doing the following.

1. Go to organization settings/invitations
2. Click on “Invite more users”
3. The invite-users modal will open (with URL that of the message feed). Click on the “cancel” button in the bottom. The invite modal will close now.
4. Click on the browser back button. The invite modal will open again (this time, with URL equal to /#invite!).
5. Click on the browser back button again. This will cause the settings pane to flash, while the URL keeps flipping between the
6. message feed one and the settings one. This loop seems to continue indefinitely if not intervened.

Similar behavior can be reproduced by:

1. Go to settings (the URL should become https://chat.zulip.org/#settings/your-account)
2. Replace the URL with https://chat.zulip.org/#organization/organization-profile

This can also be triggered by using the back button, which practically does the same thing (triggering hashchanged).

It’s quite likely that the logic for handling the hashes in the URL causes some kind of infinite loop that leads to this bug. Possibly relevant files: static/js/hashupdate.js, static/js/admin.js, static/js/settings.js, static/js/settings-panel-menu.js.

[amanagr]

2nd behaviour you described will be fixed by #17656

[timabbott]

My guess is that recent_topics.is_visible() is returning True when looking at an overlap on top of “recent topics”, like the invites modal.

function maybe_hide_recent_topics() {                                                                
    if (recent_topics.is_visible()) {                                                                
        recent_topics.hide();                                                                        
        return true;                                                                                 
    }                                                                                                
    return false;                                                                                    
}