Re: Forum Rejiggery

barnabee

To give an idea of how slow mine now is, an MSE forum page partially loads after 7 to 8 seconds, then there is a pause of a further 4 seconds before the bottom of the page and the new reply button shows. Am using IE8. Time of day doesn't appear to make any difference.

fermi

Are other people with problems using IE as well?

On Firefox 7.0.1 here, and I'm getting page load time of 3/4s at most.

Quite often less.

And most of that is the response time and page rendering I think? The actual jump from start to end of the thread (if opened that way) only accounts for a split second of that.

Plus I get pretty much exactly the same load times on the vBulletin forums used by other websites.

Former_MSE_Forum_Manager

torbrex wrote: »

Fair enough you have answered the reply button aspect that was asked but that was not why this thread was started

I asked about the speed issue, which we're not having here - the jumping issue is something that I've always had. Assumed it was just how vBulletin did it. Hadn't realised it was a change for you since we made these modifications. Does it cause an issue? It's so quick to do it for me I had never considered it a problem.

If it's taking a while to make the jump, I can certainly ask the techies to have a look - just takes them off other development things so need to weigh up the benefit.

Former_MSE_Forum_Manager

espresso wrote: »

As this post reply button is for newbies, why not link it with their newbie alert label and remove it when they are no longer newbies?

What we're trying to do is help users who don't have an account and aren't used to forums to locate a route to reply via registration and make it as obvious as possible what to click.

For the group that would have the newbie sticker, they've already got an account - we don't tend to get questions about replying from this group.

For registered users who aren't keen - hopefully a quick log on (which you're going to need to do to interact anyways) solves the issue. Appreciate this isn't the perfect solution for you if you like to view logged out, but we're trying to help new users where we can (especially those arriving at the forum from keyword searches from the likes of google who are often in need of rapid help) and it's having a positive effect so far.

As with everything, these are evolutionary processes so if we can find better ways to do it, we'll certainly try.

Former_MSE_Ian

Hi everyone,

Sorry to hear you are having speed problems. When you load a forum page you're the loading HTML, the javascript, and the images. Quite a lot of files potentially. Any one of them loading slowly could cause problems though some are more important than others. If there are any technically savvy users out there who have a web development browser extension like Firebug for Firefox installed we would love to know which particular files are taking a long time to load .

I would also like to know if this is a persisent problem? There will always be odd occasions where the forums are slow to load. This can be for all kinds of reasons. A change in demand or scheduled task causing server load, poor response from a third party server, or an unusually slow network connection between you and our servers. To name but a few. But if there is a consistent speed problem it is definitely something we want to know about. Thanks for your feedback.

Ian

torbrex

MSE_Forum_Manager wrote: »

I asked about the speed issue, which we're not having here - the jumping issue is something that I've always had. Assumed it was just how vBulletin did it. Hadn't realised it was a change for you since we made these modifications. Does it cause an issue? It's so quick to do it for me I had never considered it a problem.

If it's taking a while to make the jump, I can certainly ask the techies to have a look - just takes them off other development things so need to weigh up the benefit.

It does not cause an issue as such, it is just something that has started to happen since your recent changes, it is quick to make the jump but its the fact that I can see it happening that I thought you should be made aware of.

MSE_Ian wrote: »

Hi everyone,

Sorry to hear you are having speed problems. When you load a forum page you're the loading HTML, the javascript, and the images. Quite a lot of files potentially. Any one of them loading slowly could cause problems though some are more important than others. If there are any technically savvy users out there who have a web development browser extension like Firebug for Firefox installed we would love to know which particular files are taking a long time to load .

I would also like to know if this is a persisent problem? There will always be odd occasions where the forums are slow to load. This can be for all kinds of reasons. A change in demand of scheduled task causing server load, poor response from a third party server, or an unusually slow network connection between you and our servers. To name but a few. But if there is a consistent speed problem if is something we definitely want to know about. Thanks for your feedback.

Ian

I am aware that the content of the page affects the time that it may take to load and the reason for me bringing it to the attention of the team was because it was a change from what I was used to on the site.
I have a good broadband connection that gives no problems with the loading of pages all over the internet and MSE is just one of the 'normal' loading sites.

Former_MSE_Forum_Manager

torbrex wrote: »

It does not cause an issue as such, it is just something that has started to happen since your recent changes, it is quick to make the jump but its the fact that I can see it happening that I thought you should be made aware of.

I am aware that the content of the page affects the time that it may take to load and the reason for me bringing it to the attention of the team was because it was a change from what I was used to on the site.
I have a good broadband connection that gives no problems with the loading of pages all over the internet and MSE is just one of the 'normal' loading sites.

Thanks torbrex

If there's anything we can get the tech boys to do which will help, we will.

barnabee

Thanks Fermi. Just downloaded Firefox and the MSE forums now load correctly and promptly. Obviously something conflicting with IE.

torbrex

There seems to now be a delay of up to 5 seconds when trying to open a thread. This is definitely new, it happens every time now and I dont like it

I have noticed that it seems to be connected with the tweet & facebook icons loading on the toolbar of the opening post, this also happens on other sites around the internet that have these icons.

Navigating round the boards seems to be OK but its when I click on a thread that I get a delay, I am using IE8 and XP pro.

Browntoa

see what you mean , firefox working fine , lag on IE8 and Win XP Home