Are you experiencing problems with the site?

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Hi Steve-- Just to add to your woes:

I usually preview my messages prior to posting. Sometimes, when I hit the "submit reply" button the message fails to post-- this happens with about 1-in-5 messages.

[Steve Ashton]

Riverkilt,

Ron, I'm sorry about your problem with the time it takes to load pages while using dial-up.

The fact is that this forum is huge. All the graphics and all the photos stored in all the forums, threads, and galleries must reload each and every time you move around the forum. Large, hi pixel content photos, are the worst of all when it comes to re-loading pages.

With all the forum sections, threads, posts photos and graphics on this site the only way to get them to load faster is to prune and delete stuff.

Our hope is that as people get used to the new map that we can delete all the regional, state, provincial, and country sub-forums. This should speed things up. Notice that I said "should'. We won't know for sure how much time it will save till we try it.

The reason things load in a particular order is because the forum is built in layers. The first layer to load is the Tartan background, Then everything else is placed on top of that in further layers. I didn't plan to have the advertiser banners layer load before the forum layer it is just how the software does it.

[Steve Ashton]

MOR,

I have never experienced the problem you are experiencing.
I do know that there is a short, 5 second delay, between hitting the submit button to prevent people from double posting. There is also a delay between submitting two posts. for the same reason.

I don't know if this is the cause of your problem but I have added it to the list for our next troubleshooting session.

[JSFMACLJR]

Steve,
I don't know if this is an error or not, but when trying to access someone's profile today, I received the following message:

JSFMACLJR, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

I can assure you I was only trying to check this individual's profile! Is there now an option to block access to the profiles of Forumers?

Regards,
Sandford MacLean

[Steve Ashton]

Scotcop,

Yes, we know of this glitch. It has been mentioned before in this thread.


JSFMACLJR,

Can you please tell me which profile you were trying to access? It may be that the member has registered, but not yet activated their account after getting the email with the code to do so. It may also be that the member has activated their account but are still in moderation until they have posted two posts. This has been a part of our forum for quite some time and is the best way the Forum Moderators have of screening new registrations from spammers.

Just so everyone knows, we get between 10 and 20 spammers registering to the forum each day. We pass all registrations through websites that keep lists of known spammers and we moderate the first posts of all new registrations.

[BoldHighlander]

Steve,
I don't know if this is an error or not, but when trying to access someone's profile today, I received the following message:

JSFMACLJR, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

I can assure you I was only trying to check this individual's profile! Is there now an option to block access to the profiles of Forumers?

Regards,
Sandford MacLean

Sandy (& Steve),

this has happened to me when I've attempted to view a new members profile.

:: T ::

[KiltedPilot]

Steve,

This is very unlikely to be related to the size of the forum ... else everyone will be experiencing slow loading times. In the spectrum of vBulletin forums in existence, Xmarks is quite a modest sized forum (there are vBulletin forums with 8 million members, and over 100 million posts -- that is many hundreds of times larger than Xmarks).

I did a quick check, and there are over 363,000 bytes of graphics on the front page of the forum. Depending on how fast Ron's dialup is, this amount of graphics will take from 1 minute to over 5 minutes to download. (In theory, this should get cached at his end for some subsequent requests, so the first page might be slow, but the second page request should be faster).

The graphic causing the biggest problem is the kilted lineup on the top right ("page_bg.png"), this is 226,000 bytes by itself. This could, by itself, add minutes to Ron's download. This is unusually large for a webpage graphic, especially one that appears so prevalently. I'm guessing this graphic is so large because you wanted to get a transparent background, and so used PNG format. If you had used JPEG, you could have easily made the graphic a tenth that size (for the same dimensions on the page), but would lose transparency. Compressing PNG graphics is more challenging than JPEG.

I've given Ron some tips by PM as to how to stop that problematic graphic loading.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Riverkilt,

Ron, I'm sorry about your problem with the time it takes to load pages while using dial-up.

The fact is that this forum is huge. All the graphics and all the photos stored in all the forums, threads, and galleries must reload each and every time you move around the forum. Large, hi pixel content photos, are the worst of all when it comes to re-loading pages.

With all the forum sections, threads, posts photos and graphics on this site the only way to get them to load faster is to prune and delete stuff.

Our hope is that as people get used to the new map that we can delete all the regional, state, provincial, and country sub-forums. This should speed things up. Notice that I said "should'. We won't know for sure how much time it will save till we try it.

The reason things load in a particular order is because the forum is built in layers. The first layer to load is the Tartan background, Then everything else is placed on top of that in further layers. I didn't plan to have the advertiser banners layer load before the forum layer it is just how the software does it.

[Steve Ashton]

OK Mike, I have a question.

Where were you when I was searching frantically for a vBulletin programmer? We just finished a major upgrade to the site. We needed to delete 15 outdated modules, remove old and conflicting add-ons, and de-bug the entire site.

I am not a programmer by any means. I'm an engineer and kiltmaker. I don't even talk the same language.
I can only go with what my programmer told me. And he is in the UK. We had to do all our communication via odd hour Skype messages and emails due to the time difference.

We sure could have used the help of someone in the same time zone.

[Scotcop]

I canna access me profile frum the mayn payge, the blasted brewser says thereis an arrer, and that I canna see it. Soo I haveta click on the USER CP button, and then go to me profile

[Riverkilt]

Thanks, this was just a four minute load. At least now I know what I'm waiting for...can imagine it happening while I wait.