I hesitate to even report this one because it SEEMS to require a very specific set of circumstances to trigger it. Still, just in case it’s symptomatic of something more serious I’ll mention it.
There are circumstances in which, when I reach a new level, the “congratulations” video doesn’t play. The semi-opaque black background (it looks like about 50% opacity) that usually sits behind the video appears, but then… no video, and no way to clear the black screen. The page is unresponsive to any keys that I’ve tried. (Except… I cannot say hand on heart that I clearly remember trying Escape. I think I did, but I can’t swear to it. If or when it happens again I’ll check and confirm or deny that.)
What are these circumstances? As far as I can tell it’s only when:
I’m in text input mode; and
I’ve entered a character into the next question’s answer field before the video loads.
The second point implies that this can ONLY happen when I’m in Vocabulary skill mode rather than Listening skill mode, because in the latter you can’t start entering until the audio has played. (In fact the question doesn’t even render on screen until the audio has played, which is of course a good thing.) And, of course, it needs to be a sentence where I can guess / intuit / whatever immediately what the cloze will be and have started typing it, which makes the occurrence rarer still notwithstanding my typing speed which is not at all slow.
It’s not even remotely a major drama; the worst that happens is that I reload the page and the count of questions starts from 0 again, but in the overall scheme of things that matters to me not one iota. Still, as I said… just in case it’s symptomatic of something more dramatic I thought I’d bring it up.
OK, it just happened to me again. Escape definitely doesn’t work. Interestingly, though, if I complete the entry I can just continue on with the collection… I’m just doing it behind a semi-opaque black overlay. As long as I’m on keyboard only, it’s fine. However the second I click anywhere on the screen, the input box loses focus and there’s no way of getting back to it other than the page reload one.
Thanks for letting us know and sorry for the trouble! We’re having some trouble reproducing - if you run into this issue again and notice any other details/patterns please be sure to let us know. Thanks again!
It happened to me just now, for the first time ever: I started typing the next answer and seemingly interrupted the loading of the congratulatory sceen. My diagnosis pretty much coincides with that of @LuciusVorenusX; the only thing I have to add is that I’m on a slow mobile connection so the loading of the video is very slow, which might make it more easy to trigger the problem.
And now it happened again! This time I wasn’t typing, so we can rule out that factor. But I’m still on a slow and some unreliable mobile connection that occasionally resets. My current hypothesis is that the loading of the animated GIF is interrupted, which aborts the load of the dialog window.
Update: And again! This time, the animation was slowly loading, but it had not started playing at normal speed before the dialog disappeared and the window was left disabled.
I wouldn’t count on that. I think you’re correct when you said:
However I believe that typing ahead is one way of that happening. That said, I agree that it’s not the ONLY way, because I had it happen recently when I had yet to type anything for the next question. I didn’t post about it here because to be honest I was left with the feeling of “Woah, what just happened there?” The new question was a slightly cryptic one and I was too engrossed in it to be really conscious about what was happening in the user interface at the time, so I didn’t have any useful information to add. Refreshing the page cleared it… though unfortunately it cleared my cryptic question as well. No matter, it will be back…
We’re still having some trouble reproducing this issue, but pushed up a holdover fix that should ensure pressing escape will remove the modal if this happens again.