"What have you done to my beloved forum?!" - Page 11  

 

Thanx.

 

Just curious, I know that there were issues with the new B&S. When you click the page numbers at the top of the page it brings you to the top of the page you clicked for. However when you click the numbers at the bottom it goes to the bottom of the next page. When I clicked on the last page page my screen turned light blue (background color) as it apparently went all the way to the bottom of the page, even below the ebay shoe ads...
 

 

 

Those are glitches that need to be fixed. In addition, we will be changing the rules and enhanced seller options to make the marketplace more dynamic, combining the structure of the new with the freewheeling style of the old, allowing sellers a variety of ways to market, instead of shoehorning what they can and cannot do in threads.

Cheers,

Fok.

Great! Thanx!

 

Just curious, how long before its fully implemented?

 

 

You are talking about B&S? Well, I'm going to ask Spoo to pass the system by the peanut gallery. They we will change the seller group prices and permissions, see if one small technical change can be implemented, and be on our way.

We screwed up once, let's have a little patience before going onto the next thing.

The forum looks much better without all the extra empty space.

Good job.

Chrome is version 12.0.742.122, Safari is version 5.0.5 (6533.21.1). AFAIK Chrome is at the latest stable version, because it auto-updates. OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.


This is Safari viewing the new SF, one tab, 52.5% CPU utilisation. It can peak at 80%. and the fans are running at full speed. No other forums do this, except Huddler ones. Maybe the browsers are trying to ping some third-party advert or tracking server which is not responding or is unreachable because I'm in China. Plus there is a heck of a lot of javascript in the new SF pages, perhaps too much.

Pages are still taking around 30 seconds to load, images and avatars are taking over a minute to load. Compared to the 15 seconds that the old SF took to fully download pages.

For the benefit of anyone who might know about this stuff, this is my Ping and Traceroute to styleforum.net

PING styleforum.net (67.228.167.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=988.982 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=988.965 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=988.903 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=988.636 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=988.414 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=5 ttl=50 time=988.441 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=6 ttl=50 time=988.282 ms

traceroute to styleforum.net (67.228.167.131), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 116.115.128.1 (116.115.128.1) 2.303 ms 9.565 ms 10.110 ms
2 116.115.115.69 (116.115.115.69) 9.893 ms 10.503 ms 9.745 ms
3 61.138.69.169 (61.138.69.169) 18.724 ms 10.027 ms 10.043 ms
4 202.99.226.133 (202.99.226.133) 149.420 ms * 19.532 ms
5 219.158.24.145 (219.158.24.145) 18.046 ms 27.544 ms 20.280 ms
6 219.158.4.94 (219.158.4.94) 75.483 ms 81.760 ms 80.735 ms
7 219.158.3.250 (219.158.3.250) 68.899 ms 70.266 ms 70.886 ms
8 219.158.96.250 (219.158.96.250) 70.672 ms 71.601 ms 70.008 ms
9 219.158.29.170 (219.158.29.170) 136.822 ms 137.842 ms 130.389 ms
10 219.158.32.10 (219.158.32.10) 133.647 ms 135.693 ms 140.654 ms
11 los-edge-03.inet.qwest.net (67.14.22.178) 941.213 ms 937.202 ms 978.151 ms
12 208.46.191.210 (208.46.191.210) 941.132 ms 947.220 ms 940.028 ms
13 po5.bbr01.eq01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.140) 972.803 ms 975.258 ms 980.366 ms
14 po5.dar01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.191) 970.942 ms 969.502 ms 970.584 ms
15 po1.fcr04.sr05.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.214) 982.119 ms 981.294 ms 979.982 ms
16 67.228.167.131-static.reverse.softlayer.com (67.228.167.131) 988.592 ms 988.466 ms 990.103 ms

Ping times suddenly jump to almost a second when it gets to the 'qwest.net' line. I do know that a long ping time is bad.

My ISP details:
IP Address: 116.115.141.221
Hostname: 116.115.141.221
IP Country: China
IP Country Code: CHN
IP Continent: Asia
IP Region: Beijing
Guessed City: Beijing
IP Latitude: 39.9289
IP Longitude: 116.3883
Organization: China Unicom Neimeng Province Network
ISP Provider: China Unicom Neimeng Province Network

It's a bummer SF is no longer viewable any mobile device, except apparently iPad 2s. A lightweight mobile version of SF is definitely needed here.
Edited by MikeDT - 7/23/11 at 2:46am

we're running exactly the same versions of chrome then. My guess is that something fishy is up with your route, but my technical knowledge ends at the ethernet plugin. I hope that there is someone on the forum who can shed some light on this, because it isnt your computer.

Thanks for listening and willing to make changes. I don't feel any lag on my iPad. The only time I feel it when pics in the B&S take ages to load. Anyways, the forum feels far better than what it was in the first 2 days.

China is a funny place. It blocks all sorts of sites and ad-networks, or, AFAIK, checks them, not all that efficiently, before letting them through. We'll see what we can do, but for people in the PRC, we know that it is tough. Sorry guys.

I think China likes to operate it's own ad networks, and certain ad networks from outside the PRC are blocked or slowed down. e.g. Google's AdSense and DoubleClick. Probably the same with some tracking and usage networks. I did try using a proxy as well to view SF, but it didn't seem to make much difference.

However all is not bad, I found a good way to browse and post on SF with phones and tablets, Opera Mini. http://www.opera.com/mobile/ Works on Android, Blackberry, iOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Java. Opera's servers compress and process complex webpages rendering them suitable for viewing on a mobile device using the Opera Mini client. Seems to work just fine with SF2.0, loads quick as well. Great for anyone with a limited 3G data allowance, because Opera Mini is only downloading a highly compressed version of the site.

About the CPU hogging and the long loading times, I think I solved this as well. I have Ghostery for Chrome, this shows what third-party ad and tracking networks a site uses. So I could possibly see what was causing the hangups. It showed Facebook, Google Adsense, Google Analytics and Quantcast. I know Facebook is unreachable here, if one tries to access Facebook.com directly, the browser will just sit there repeatedly sending requests to a server which is not there. Some of Google's non-Chinese services are blocked or can be very slow.

So I've added the domains for these sites into my hosts file, along with a few others like DoubleClick, Comscore and Omniture. This means that any browser on my computer will get an immediate 'Not found.', instead of fruitlessly trying to access a third-party site it can't get to. Doing this seems to have improved quite a few sites for me, although these where not as bad as SF.

There is another thing which I've observed with some websites, not because they're blocked, is that they'll ignore HTTP requests from Chinese IP addresses. Presumably because of security concerns, botnet DDoS attacks, hacking, much of which seems to originate from China. So what happens the browser appears to be loading a page, but will just sit there repeatedly sending HTTP requests and eventually gives up after a couple of minutes.

Done the same on my UMPC/Netbook hosts file and SF appears to be usable on there, although it's not perfect, there is still much horizontal scrolling here.

Of course I'm no longer being tracked by any of these peeps anywhere,
Edited by MikeDT - 7/23/11 at 7:48pm

how long will we still be able to edit our archived B&S threads?

August 1, that entire section will be locked. Read the thread about how the new B&S marketplace rules are actually going to change in the next week or so.

thanks for the tip.

on another note, kudos for the new messaging system. much easier to read and keep track of inquiries with the new upgrade.

The smaller avatars help quite a bit. Site is running a little faster today for me.

I just wanted to echo lefty's comment about the sense of community on SF. The new design seems to have fragmented the forum into disjointed compartments. Somehow the old version seemed more unified to me. Probably because the design was just simpler. The home page let you see the entire forum "at-a-glance" which was great. Even if you didn't venture into one of the other sub-forums at least you could get the gist of who was posting and what topics were popular without having to scroll, scroll, scroll. I felt connected to everyone else even if I didn't participate much in the other fora. Perhaps reducing the negative space and "tightening up" the layout will help get that vibe back. Anyway, just another 2 cents to add to the suggestion box. Btw, I think the new design has potential to be even better than before which is I guess the entire point.

Yeah, that was the point. I agree that the graphics could be tightened up. I think that the first thing we will do is to decrease the length of the descriptions, which are pretty wordy and which we often wrote in jest. Then we'll look at layout issues.

See, these are really useful suggestions. When we went into this, it was me, and j. J uses things like the RSS feed, and frankly, I'm a huge clothing geek, and work on a computer all day, so I don't mind scrolling. Also, I have some honking large screens if I need (though I usually use a 21"), and I always have my browsers maximized, so issues like this never even occurred to me. So, user feedback is really useful. We had over 120 users in the beta version, for over 2 months, but as you know, a beta version and a live version is really not the same, so these issues never came up there either.

Our objective was to put out the best forum out there, and we knew that there would be some issues. Some of these, we never anticipated. And unfortunately, post-conversion changes are harder to make than pre-conversion, so things are taking longer than we'd like, though the developers have generally been very responsive.