The Scottish Boinc Team

If you've been experiencing slow-loading forums at PrimeGrid, or, for that matter, any BOINC project's forums, the reason is because the Free-DC website has been down a lot recently.

Many people use forum signature images from Free-DC, which your browser loads when it displays forum messages. If Free-DC is down, your browser has to wait for the image request to Free-DC to time out. That's why the forum pages load slowly.

If you want forum pages to load more quickly, go to the Community Preferences page and check the "hide signatures" box. Don't forget to click on the "Update" button at the bottom.


SOURCE http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8290

This obviously effects our forum to.

Hmmm - I realise this will probably be an unpopular, minority view but I'd be in favour of banning images from signatures altogether I think they detract from, rather than add to, the threads making it harder to see what has been written. Just my

davidBAM wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 11:31 am Hmmm - I realise this will probably be an unpopular, minority view but I'd be in favour of banning images from signatures altogether I think they detract from, rather than add to, the threads making it harder to see what has been written. Just my

Think that may be a view of one However I do think that people should stick to a reasonable size of signature provided by only one site. Multiple signatures or signatures that extend down rather than across the page and that take up half the page can be annoying.

Alez wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:35 pm Think that may be a view of one

Story of my life

To be fair, the push by google etc to force all websites to be https by shaming and fear mongering on the browsers doesn't help either as all the stat sites are http. As far as I'm aware the browser tries to load https content before grudgingly allowing the http content and moaning that the site is not secure. I can see the point for a banking app, bloody intrusion on a forum with no private data to harvest.

Alez wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:35 pmHowever I do think that people should stick to a reasonable size of signature provided by only one site. Multiple signatures or signatures that extend down rather than across the page and that take up half the page can be annoying.

Understood and acted upon

Dirk Broer wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 11:54 pm

Alez wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:35 pmHowever I do think that people should stick to a reasonable size of signature provided by only one site. Multiple signatures or signatures that extend down rather than across the page and that take up half the page can be annoying.

Understood and acted upon

???? [mention]Dirk Broer[/mention] I was certainly not mentioning anyone on here. Some of the sigs on project forums etc take up half a page was my reference. If I had an issue with someone on here I would have asked them in private.

I am thinking the threads now open faster, are easier to read and open at the correct place I think the big graphics in the signatures confused phpbb. Saves a ton of bandwidth too

[mention]davidBAM[/mention] the threads are opening faster because no sigs are being displayed. Formula Boinc is down. Most of us use a sig site run by the same guy that runs FB and runs on the same server.
There is no doubt the sigs slow the forum down, but a huge part is being able to display your bragging rights as a sig.

[mention]davidBAM[/mention] I have tried in the past to try to find an add on or figure out a way to cache the signature images locally ( have plenty of space ) but have been unsuccessful. The forum does run noticeably faster when we are not downloading from sebs sig site.

He also runs the LaF forums. He is one busy boy!

Bryan wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 6:20 am He also runs the LaF forums. He is one busy boy!

Formula Boinc
Seb sig site
LaF forums
WUProp
statsbzh

and probably more I don't know about.

Well I may have a compromise I can try.
1st I can upload my sig to the forum and fetch that locally. Since I make up a large number of the posts this should help. Downside is that I will have to update manually every now and again. However my sig will be available when Sebs sites are down so more plus than downside.
2nd I think I can change the coding that displays the threads in such a way that it only displays your sig on the first post you make on each topic. I'll try and look at this today before I go away.

I didn't intend to put you to huge amounts of trouble - as you say, I am probably a minority of one. For what it is worth though, it grates with me because I ignore them 100% of the time; I suspect most people ignore them 99% of the time

My signature is now brought in locally from the TSBT server. I think that alone makes things faster. My posts definitely load quicker.

I think I will make a post offering to store locally the sigs of anyone that wants. I'll also point out the upside and downside of this approach. Obviously the main downside is that I will now have to update sigs manually as will users before I can do the manual update.

My understanding is that the signaturestats people could help immensely by including sensible cache-control directives : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... he-Control

This would mean everyone's browser used a cached image after the first load (until it went stale after say 24 hours). Maybe they already do this, I haven't looked.

davidBAM wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 12:05 pm My understanding is that the signaturestats people could help immensely by including sensible cache-control directives : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... he-Control

This would mean everyone's browser used a cached image after the first load (until it went stale after say 24 hours). Maybe they already do this, I haven't looked.

Most of the changes I made to the coding of the site and forum is to ensure the site works and looks the same on all browsers and platforms ( I use 5 different browsers ). I need a solution that works locally and doesn't rely on people making changes just to accommodate my requirements. The ideal solution is to cache the sigs locally on our server and refresh them at a fixed time. I've looked a few times and it's not something I've ever found a solution to. It's a thing that has been a headache for phpbb admins for years. Coding time I think as I should have a few hours this afternoon.
If you have a minute or two I'll make a post on the development site for you to help me with.

Will help if I can

Fact is that the TSBT-site loads a lot slower the last week or so.
Bok's server has periodic trouble the last weeks, Sebastien's server broke yesterday: someone has it in for our hobby.
Revenge of the mad Belgian? GreedCoin, a.ka.a "the Borg" doing bot attacks?

Dirk Broer wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 12:40 pm Fact is that the TSBT-site loads a lot slower the last week or so.
Bok's server has periodic trouble the last weeks, Sebastien's server broke yesterday: someone has it in for our hobby.
Revenge of the mad Belgian? GreedCoin, a.ka.a "the Borg" doing bot attacks?

Yes, there has been lots of errors fetching external content mainly I suspect the sigs. I was shocked by the posts on Primegrid that the gridcoin client acts as a DDOS attack by scrapping the stats from all project servers from multiple clients all at the same time. No wonder smaller projects are having server issues. I think more projects will dump them once they become aware. We have had a few strange events to, can't comment on the mad waffler.
I'm going to cache peoples sigs locally so they display whether sites are down or not. I'll make a post for anyone that wants to take up the offer.
Testing the forum to display a users sig on their first post on any topic only. That will help a lot as long as people are happy with the changes.

It seems getting slower again

Fine for me I must say

davidBAM wrote: ↑Tue Nov 20, 2018 7:15 am Fine for me I must say

Sebs signature site was very slow loading Mega's signature last night.

There again, my connection speed out here is up and down more often than the undergarments of a working girl with dubious morals