New forum/site is a pain in the butt / doesnt load

I dont know what you changed, but the new forum and site are a total worthless mess to me.

Bigger images like the background one NEVER load properly, always having errors, menus are wonky, each page takes forever to load, and upon several reloads either: gets Content Encoding Error, goes blank, stalls, loads only partial, or loads with severe errors, and only after I click reload like a madman MIGHT come up, slowly, if I am lucky.

The forum is unusable like that for me. It took me over half an hour to get here and post this. Perhaps the new one is just too uber-spiffy and overladden with images and functionalities the tubes it has to go through to me? I never had any problems like that with the old forum.

Sitting in Europe, US account, Windows XP SP2, Firefox 3, 1000 Kbit connection on a new and potent machine. And yes, I normally can haz internets fine.

(edit: on IE or other browsers I have the CoX site/forum doesnt work either)

That's weird. I'm on XP with Firefox 3 and it works fine. There was another thread about certain Firefox plug-ins causing problems (unable to stay logged in). Have you got a lot of plug-ins? I have AdBlock Plus, NoScript and AVG.

There can be several reasons for your problem.

o You may have a malware/trojan/virus on your system that affects it.
o You may have a proxy somewhere that affects your browsing. The old forum for example didn't like it if you browsed through a squid-proxy and stalled constantly.
o You may have a broken plugin activated in your browser.
o You may have some problems with your network.
o You may have a virus-scanner/firewall that acts up.

Look here for tips on how to check your computer for problems: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=126250

Problems are still there to full extent. I am also getting a lot of lag recently in the game (Triumph server when it was not full at all) but I hear I am not alone with that.

Well I doubt that malware that made it through my firewall affects explicitly cityofheroes.com while the rest works fine.
I am not running an anti-virus, My firewall didnt block anything when I attempt to load the page, I dont have any browser plugins installed (hate!) and I do not use a proxy myself.
And I did NOT have any problems with the old forum.

I really think the new pages are too overladden or complicatedly created in realtime for whatever funny route they have to take to me.


( Is there a chance of getting a plain html version perhaps? )

PS: Thanks for the link, but the GAME runs fine. Just laggy recently.

Under firefox 3.0 and IE 6 I get the same following issues, all intermittent.When I hit Reply to a private message, it comes up as a new message to send.Multiquote and Quick Reply buttons only rarely function.Last read button next to threa title incapable of keeping track properly.Last Visited timestamp is never accurate.Having to use quote to reply means that I have to manually add which I refuse to do.These problems exist at work and at home.If you want a real treat, surf these forums for a while in firefox and then open up the Tools: Error Console and have fun reading.Tried editing, save failed. Had to hit Edit with the edit screen open to get a new window in the hopes that I can edit this edit successfully.

Forced upgrade to Firefox 3.5.2, quick reply button STILL doesn't work. Just hit enter twice after using New Reply button to get a screen where I could type in information. If there isn't a space between sentences 1 and 2, then even this screen it borked.

I am experiencing mysterious, time related difficulties connecting to the forums myself.

I am typically able to connect early in the morning locally, around 7:45 AM EST, and check messages. Later in the mornings, the boards seem to die. I confirm that the rest of the Internet is still up. I ping boards.cityofheroes.com and it times out with total packet failure, the same result that comes when I try to bring up the site in my browser.

Then, at some time in the afternoon, they return. I wonder if the boards are under some kind of DDOS attack that peaks in the mid morning for some reason.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

ITs funny, the only problem I have with the new forums froma tech standpoint is loading is longer than before, probably due to the graphics.

I'm using Firefox 3.5.2. Quick reply works fine, I can see things fine. I have other issues with the new boards, but they are personal opinions so I won't go into those.

I'm having buttloads of problems too. Can't seem to stay logged in for the life of me and it really shouldn't be my browser. Spacebattle.com which also uses a version vBoards (vBullitin?) has no problems whatsoever. And it all started within the last week.

Tech supports suggestion... 'Try another browser if clearing your cache doesn't fix it.'

I had to log in twice just to send this message. What sort of cookie mayhem are you guys trying to do?

Still here, even after all this time!

My experience is the opposite. I had alot of problems with the old forum like pictures taking forever to load and the page getting interrupted during load.
In contrast the new forum is very snappy for me.

Heh it was the old ubb forums that sometimes didnt load for me or took way too long to load. These work perfectly for me.

Well, I seem to have discovered the add-on in Firefox 3.5 that really bungled up the boards. So much for trying the new Cooliris...

Sigh.

Still here, even after all this time!

I did notice that the board failures seem more pronounced at work than at home, but then... it's night when I'm at home. More people are playing then instead of goofing off at work surfing.

Win7 32 RTM at work Win7 64 RTM at home on 2 machines.
Firefox 3.5.2 in all cases.
Addons: Flashblock, NoScript, Adblock, FireGestures, DisableBackspaceNavigation.
Plugins: Flash, Java (latest releases).

I've blocked the background images at work, but not at home. NoScript os configured to trust the individual CoX sites rather than trust at the domain level.

Boards have worked fine since they went live. Heck, they worked fine back in I13(?) when they beta tested the boards too.

My only issue is one on the forum admin/web end where the digests are borked.

Hm. I had a hard drive crash recently and now have the same Firefox installed as before, but without older versions having had a chance to interfere with it, and it got much better on Firefox and even an old Mozilla now. Dunno what caused it.

Yes, I agree. It is a pain in the butt.

Eco.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

The following is the error message that I get when I try to go to some of the threads on this "new" forum...

This error (HTTP 500 Internal Server Error) means that the website you are visiting had a server problem which prevented the webpage from displaying.

For more information about HTTP errors, see Help.


...very bothersome.

There is a "known" problem that's been discussed that when you bring up long threads and you have the page size set to 500, you get that error message. That may not be the only way to get it but the question is did you do this, page length set to 500 posts and try to look at a very long thread?

I'm getting what may be a similar problem with the forums. Al my buttons do what they're supposed to and I stay logged in just fine, but whenever I load the forum pages, it seems about 50/50 whether I get the page I'm supposed to or a page of blank white. generally attempting to reload the same page will continue to result in the white screen, unless I close and reload the browser, come back and try again, of course that makes it difficult if I was following a link to a post, and it still doesn't fix it sometimes. It's obnoxious enough I've just stopped bothering with the forums as much... can't read anything important half the time...

This problem does not occur with anything other than the CoH vbulletin forums (that I have found so far).

Also, loading time seems to take significantly longer, I suppose that could be from the images... (do we really need a background image for the forums?)

Yes, same here... but when it doesnt want to load it ususally doesnt work with reload anymore either. Or, really really slow (like 6 minutes for a page, prone to have errors or only half the content)

Once it was good, and I thought it was because of the new browser installation.
But then suddenly it went bad again. Then good again. Then bad again.
(and now it works again, so I quickly post before it stops again)

When it works it works fast and smooth and without any errors, and loads almost instantly.
When it doesnt, it loads to a certain point in the firefox process bar, and then freezes there.
I tried everything. DNS flushsed, browser cache cleared, browser offline data cleared, cookies deleted, firewall deactivated. Still the same result. And the system or my connection is no different when it works from when it doesnt.

My suspicion is that you have a setting on your site too low for the time PHP requests are allowed to run before a timeout is returned.
So poor people like with my 'only' 1Mbit connection at the other end of the world can get lucky and everything runs super fine, or unlucky when the tubes are clogged for us and it takes a tad bit too long, and the page stops loading. A friend and I had similar problems with our own forum once, seeming just as random and only happening to people that lived far from the server, and raising a time-before-the-request-times-out in a php ini file fixed it indeed, the default value was been way too low. (I have to ask him where and what the exact setting was in the php.ini but I think we found out on help boards so it shouldnt be all that hard to check.)

What Blue Raptor stated sounds like what I see at work. However, I changed over to IE8 and had no issues. I don't use plugins in firefox.

This leads me to believe that the forums just can't play nicely with firefox.

Well the problem is back and its worse, I cant get through to the forum anymore at all from my machine, no matter what browser, while other sites are still perfectly fine. I have to use a proxy, then it works fine. But that cant be the solution.

(Took me some time to find one that does SSL so I can log in and post.)