Tech support request

[Ediswan]

I just noticed that the 'different' 'mark read' behaviour is present again. I do appreciate that this is a side-effect.

This time I remembered to take a Wireshark network capture for later analysis of what the browser actually did when I pressed the 'back' button.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I'm now getting the "too many redirects" issue all the time on the iPad.

Edit: dumped the cache and it works now.

 

[skyhigh]

I understand ads pay for the site, but the number and amount of screen they take up are a little ridiculous, in my opinion!

 

[Bletchleyite]

Agreed, those ads are quite disruptive, I'd rather pay a small sum and not have them if viability is in question.

 

[Mojo]

I made an announcement earlier this afternoon - https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/design-changes.237632/#post-5863883

 

[najaB]

@Mojo Something has gone wrong with your ad script - it's putting ads inside each individual post rather than at the bottom of the thread!

 

[jfollows]

@Mojo Something has gone wrong with your ad script - it's putting ads inside each individual post rather than at the bottom of the thread!

Agreed, they're all over the place, top of page, bottom of page, in the middle of posts. Seem to be the same advert multiple times. Some of them may just be the attachments though.
Ignore, there are adverts but they're sort-of OK I think.

 

[skyhigh]

@Mojo Something has gone wrong with your ad script - it's putting ads inside each individual post rather than at the bottom of the thread!

2 ads inside one post (with loads of added blank space), 2 ads inside a single thread title box on the listing page and one that's taking up almost the bottom quarter of my phone screen and covering up the new post box. I hope that's not the design intention!!

 

[najaB]

2 ads inside one post (with loads of added blank space), 2 ads inside a single thread title box on the listing page and one that's taking up almost the bottom quarter of my phone screen and covering up the new post box. I hope that's not the design intention!!

Indeed. Strange spacing in the thread list:

And also ads being repeated in both the lightbox and the thread footer as well:


I think that might be overkill!

 

[skyhigh]

Indeed. Strange spacing in the thread list:
View attachment 121300
And also ads being repeated in both the lightbox and the thread footer as well:
View attachment 121301

I think that might be overkill!

I'm not using an ad blocker but all the ads have vanished for me now. The spacing is still there though, so there are massive empty spaces all over the page. Hopefully this is just teething trouble as the site is fairly unusable at the moment.

 

[Mojo]

Nothing has gone wrong, as I said in the announcements forum, we will be developing a new layout for the forum over the next few weeks, this will take a considerable amount of time so you may see some inappropriately placed adverts temporarily. No need to report this!

 

[najaB]

Nothing has gone wrong, as I said in the announcements forum, we will be developing a new layout for the forum over the next few weeks, this will take a considerable amount of time so you may see some inappropriately placed adverts temporarily. No need to report this!

Okay. Well can I give a very strong thumbs down to the current iteration. I mean, this is a bit much:

 

[JB_B]

Haven't had a chance to look properly but just today I've had a massive increase in far too large ads (making the site unusable on some devices when logged in) - and at the same time (presumably related) the too-many-redirects problems are back.


Edit: seems to be back to normal now.

Is there a dev site you can test these things on?

 

[GusB]

Haven't had a chance to look properly but just today I've had a massive increase in far too large ads (making the site unusable on some devices when logged in) - and at the same time (presumably related) the too-many-redirects problems are back.


Edit: seems to be back to normal now.

Is there a dev site you can test these things on?

See the relevant post above:

Nothing has gone wrong, as I said in the announcements forum, we will be developing a new layout for the forum over the next few weeks, this will take a considerable amount of time so you may see some inappropriately placed adverts temporarily. No need to report this!

 

[Paul Kelly]

I'm using the same ad system (Ezoic) experimentally on www.ltfares.com although I'm not very happy with it and will probably end up changing it back to Google ads in due course. The way it works is that you give the system quite a lot of control over your site and indicate lots of different "placeholders" where it might possibly inject ads - it then uses a sort of trial and error approach to see what works and what doesn't and in theory should automatically settle down on ads that aren't too annoying to the user but still bring good revenue to the site.

 

[Recessio]

The redirect problem has just appeared again within the last 24h for me. Chrome on Android, Firefox on Ubuntu. Also tried using a VPN but no luck.

Had to find this thread by looking at "What's new" until I found a post in General Discussion and could go back without going to the home. Page...

 

[Ambient Sheep]

Same here with the Redirect issue. Not had any trouble with it whatsoever until now (had no idea some people had been struggling) but had trouble getting on tonight.

Only managed it via a saved bookmark to Infrastructure & Stations and then doing a search for "Cookies" to find a suitable thread (this one, hopefully!).

Clicking Forums at the top brings back the error (due to it including the www I guess).

Chrome 100.0.4896.127 on Android 7.0.

Hopefully just some DNS thing that will propagate itself right soon (am on Virgin wifi at present), but if not, here's the report.

 

[Ashley Hill]

Safari will not let me access the site menu. It says it cannot open page due to too many redirections.

 

[Mojo]

Have you tried clearing your cache? As any problems were short lived to a few minutes yesterday evening whilst we were doing a technical change.

 

[Mike395]

Apologies,it seems there were indeed further issues overnight. I've now taken control back from our ad provider and I think we're going to consider this a failed experiment so it shouldn't happen again once DNS updates for everyone.

 

[Ashley Hill]

Thanks,it now seems to be working fine.

 

[najaB]

Apologies,it seems there were indeed further issues overnight. I've now taken control back from our ad provider and I think we're going to consider this a failed experiment so it shouldn't happen again once DNS updates for everyone.

Thanks. There definitely was something screwy going on.

 

[Paul Kelly]

Apologies,it seems there were indeed further issues overnight. I've now taken control back from our ad provider and I think we're going to consider this a failed experiment so it shouldn't happen again once DNS updates for everyone.

Seems quite similar to my experiences with Ezoic. The money is indeed good, but the amount of control you have to give them over the site and the annoyingness of the ads means on balance it probably isn't worth it. However it did help me to learn which ads work well without being overly annoying, and I am going to try to re-implement that using Google Ads on my sites...

 

[Bletchleyite]

Have you tried clearing your cache? As any problems were short lived to a few minutes yesterday evening whilst we were doing a technical change.

For me clearing cookies, cache etc fixed it.

 

[Turtle]

For me clearing cookies, cache etc fixed it.

Something still the matter with the site today. I've cleared cache and cookies but can only partially access it such as this section.

 

[WesternBiker]

I'm also still having problems logging on to the main site address using Safari on my iPhone (last night and today). I can log in fine on Safari and Chrome on my MacBook.

I get the error message "Safari cannot open the page because too many redirects occurred."

I have cleared the cache and cookies, to no avail. Other websites are working fine.

 

[DelW]

As well as the "too many redirects" message repeatedly blocking access, I noticed that a lot of the little icons aren't appearing, with a cross in a rectangle instead (presumably indicating the place where an icon should fit).

It's most frustrating, despite having cleared cookies and caches, I have to use Google to link to a specific forum to get in at all.

Whatever this experiment was about, it seriously hasn't worked!

 

[JB_B]

I think that on an iphone, toggling airplane mode off/on should flush the dns cache. That’s just worked for me.

 

[WesternBiker]

I think that on an iphone, toggling airplane mode off/on should flush the dns cache. That’s just worked for me.

Yay! Thank you.

That's just worked for me (when restarting my phone didn't).

 

[Ambient Sheep]

Yes, further to my earlier post, would just like to confirm that all seems ok now. Thanks for fixing it.