Not long ago a new UI element showed up on the LingQ pages - a sidebar that urges me to “Share” the page on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and more. It’s innocuous enough, except in the layout I’m using it covers up a bit of my lesson text - one or two characters at the beginning of each line. It shows up on every page, so each time I load a new lesson, I have to hover my mouse over it, so the tiny triangle that collapses it would show up, and then aim on the aforementioned triangle to make the thing go away. My Japanese lessons are pretty long, so I only have to deal with it once in a while. But I’ve only just started with German. The lessons I’m using are really short, so I finish them quickly. That means I have to deal with the sidebar quite often. After a while it got really annoying. I believe there should be an option somewhere in my profile or account settings that would disable it permanently.
I’m happy someone brought this up. I do not see the Share panel anymore.
**edit: I guess I do not see them now because I use the Ghostery add-on for my browsers.
They are really distracting and annoying. I also agree with GreenAirplane. They should, at least, be smaller in size. I think that they are unproportionally large.
“I believe there should be an option somewhere in my profile or account settings that would disable it permanently.”
I agree with this proposal. We should have some discretion to customize the page according to our own needs.
I agree they are annoying. I often zoom in to read long texts and they cover the text. Sharing could be more naturally part of the dialog that pops up when you finish a lesson.
Sorry about this! We agree. It is annoying and it has been removed. It was a by product of adding it to the proficiency test page Language Proficiency Test but we have now figured out how to remove from all other pages. It should be gone now except in Chrome for some whose Chrome has a particularly sticky cache. In those cases it may take time or a manual clear of your cache.
It’s still there for me, and I use Safari, not Chrome.
In Chrome, I was finally able to get rid of it by going to Clear Browsing Data and then selecting both Cookies and other browsing data and cached images and clearing these. Presumably if you clear cookies and browsing data from Safari this should also get rid of it.
Based on mark’s post I’d guess your browser has cached the page along with the sidebar. If you clear your browser cache, it should go away.