LayerSlider 7.5 was a massive update with many new features like text mask effects, transition presets, layer transition mirroring, new slide transitions, and more. However, this post is dedicated to a smaller change that’s still important to discuss. With LayerSlider 7.5, we’ve changed how Ending Transition and Ending Text Transition behave, which can affect projects you’ve already built and might result in layers never animating out and stockpiling on each other.

Background

For quite some time now, LayerSlider has been following the logic that layers should have an opening transition to become visible and an ending transition to disappear. Simple enough. However, LayerSlider also had a safety check and a hidden mechanism to force layers out at the end of slides unless they were explicitly static layers. It made sense in almost every case but was inconsistent and a deviation from how the slider should work. After all, the option to disable ending transitions is there, and it should have a meaningful effect.

New Behavior

In the latest versions, layers without ending transitions will remain in the scene and act like static layers. This might be strange at first, but it’s only logical that if a layer has no ending transition, then it shouldn’t disappear. Not even at the end of the slide.

More on Slides

By the way: slides. Allow us to go on a quick tangent here. Slides in LayerSlider are different from what you probably think they are. They are more like animation scenes with the function to separate animation sections and clear up workspace clutter when working with numerous layers. They are named slides for clarity, and, of course, you can absolutely use them in the way you’ve always thought of them. LayerSlider heavily encourages that so they conform to user expectations. However, layers are not tied to their origin slide, and they exist across all slides, giving the plugin extreme flexibility. Under the hood, layers can come and go whenever they want, and when you’re using static layers, you essentially specify their exit point. Knowing that everything is in the background at all times, just waiting for an action to do something, we hope you better understand why a layer without an ending transition should remain in the scene and never animate out.

Implications

This change should not affect projects built correctly. Layers have an ending transition by default, which eliminates possible issues. However, if you’ve disabled both Ending Transition and Ending Text Transition for your layers, then it was likely an incorrect step. They only worked as expected in the past because the above-mentioned safety check forced them out of the scene at the end of slides anyway. The result in such a case with the new changes would be layers starting to stockpile on each other and never animating out.

Land of sand.

Home of the Spice Melange.

The Spice controls
the Empire.

What the issue looks like.

Land of sand.

Home of the Spice Melange.

The Spice controls
the Empire.

How the slider should work.

How to Fix

LayerSlider 7.7, our next big update, will be released in a few days, and it’ll automatically detect this issue and prompt you to fix it with a single click of a button.

Alternatively, you can manually adjust all layers on a slide with multiple selection mode. Range-select your layers in the layers list by holding down the key, then choose the Ending Transition option from the transition dropdown list to enable it with the switch below. You need to repeat this for every slide in your project.

One More Thing

Throughout this post, we’ve referenced “ending transitions” in a plural form. It’s because we have two separate ending transitions. Ending Transition is the default transition type you’d use in most cases. Ending Text Transition serves the same purpose, but instead of animating the whole layer, it splits textual content into chars, words, or lines depending on your selection and animates each fragment independently. What’s important is that it’s enough to have either one of them enabled for layers to animate out.

Closing Thoughts

The issue discussed is not a bug but a logical behavior to keep transition functions consistent. It affects only a handful of special cases where any strangeness directly results from how layers are configured. Most of you reading this don’t need to change anything. We only received a few reports on this and thought we’d share more on the subject. We hope this post was helpful in avoiding unexpected cases like this and providing a bit more understanding of the inner workings of LayerSlider.

Summary

We’re receiving reports that GoDaddy has identified one of LayerSlider’s plugin files as malware. This is a false detection since LayerSlider does not and has never contained any malware or viruses. We’re still waiting for an official response, but some reports suggest that GoDaddy might have already realized the mistake on their part. In the meantime, we’ve released a new update to mitigate this and future issues on our side as well. This issue might have also affected other hosting providers; thus, updating to LayerSlider 7.6.1 is strongly recommended for anyone. At the moment, we believe only LayerSlider 7.6.0 users were affected.

About The Incident

After releasing LayerSlider 7.6.0, GoDaddy started to notify their customers that their sites contain viruses or content that violates GoDaddy’s Universal Terms of Service, which might involve account suspension. They didn’t provide specifics other than mentioning one of LayerSlider’s plugin files: layerslider.kreaturamedia.jquery.js. As noted above, LayerSlider does not contain any malware or viruses, and this is a false detection. We’ve reached out to GoDaddy, but they have yet to react at the time of writing.

GoDaddy’s security scans are powered by Sucuri. We didn’t receive complaints from other sources, but more hosting companies and security solutions relying on Sucuri might also be affected.

Reports suggest that GoDaddy might have already realized the mistake on their part. However, they appear to have mixed messaging. Some customers’ sites are working correctly without any issues, and GoDaddy allegedly said the issue was resolved. At the same time, GoDaddy deleted the falsely flagged file in other cases, resulting in broken websites.

What We Did

We believe the issue is related to how we compress our JavaScript files. Our prior technique is nothing unusual, and we’ve never experienced any problems with it. While it was beneficial to reduce file sizes significantly and optimize for delivery, it also made the codebase somewhat obscure that security solutions might misinterpret.

From now on, we’re using another method for minification to avoid similar cases. We’ve used our previous method for a reason, and sadly, the new one is less efficient than the previous one. However, modern web browsers and servers support gzipped content delivery, so this change shouldn’t negatively affect site performance.

What Should You Do

If you’re affected, we urge you to update to LayerSlider 7.6.1. Reaching out to GoDaddy that this is a false detection is also recommended. If you didn’t receive a notification or report, you likely don’t have to do anything, but updating LayerSlider is still recommended.

We’re always taking security very seriously, and we appreciate your understanding in this matter.

Sincerely,
Kreatura Team