I don't have CentralAuth on my wiki, so I'm not sure this is the same issue, but it's probably related.

So this is not a Wikimedia wiki?

In general, please specify that in bug reports (if you're using a non-Wikimedia wiki).

Your skin probably needs to hide this text, or maybe we can by default.

This sounds a little weird; the nojs CSS should override the number from the beginning, regardless of JS (without having to wait for load)

I'd like to look at the style you're using. Do you have a public access to the wiki?

The default vector CSS moves the text off the screen, so it's not seen on wikimedia wikis, although the problem exists there as well. This did not happen on the 1.28 branch, but is now happening on 1.29.

You can see an example at beta . strategywiki . org

(from an IRC conversation) -

Alright so I think there are 2 issues here

1. The text of the <a> going upwards (intentional, for accessibility concerns)
2. The inconsistency that happens when you click the badge and load the system

#1 is intentional; we didn't have it initially and got huge issues with screen readers. I don't remember the details of why "title=''" isn't enough, but it wasn't. Also, when the <a> is empty, it caused horrible rendering issues in some browsers. #2 is a bug which I am fixing right now. The behavior, whatever it is, should be consistent when the badge updates its count. A fix is upcoming.

But there's almost a third issue, which slightly concerns me more because it may be a symptom of something bigger -- the fact your theme doesn't seem to render the base-css at all. Is this intentional? Is the skin overriding the classes?

Change 375482 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mooeypoo; owner: Mooeypoo):
[mediawiki/extensions/Echo@master] Consistently use the message when updating count

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/375482

Change 375482 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Echo@master] Consistently use the message when updating count

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/375482