Cannot click through the opening in sideways stairs

I decided to update my 1.8 survival world (which was originally 1.7) and i went into my secret underground library and tried to flip my secret lever to access my secret storage room and i couldn't click through the sideways stair that I could click through before updating, so i panicked for a bit and decided to remove the stair altogether until i can come up with a better solution or see if it's a bug, i set up a demonstration so i can take pictures for this bug report and found if a leave a visual gap in the blocks you can click through it making me believe it's not a bug and making this whole bug report redundant :/