The forum is getting to be hard work
 

I may be the only one that this happens to, but navigating the forums is getting to be hard work. It's often very slow and regularly fails to show the contents of the page, forcing me to do a refresh. Because I have no problems like this on other sites' forums, it seems to me that there must be an issue specific to the AG forums. Is there a known problem?

I haven't experienced any problems as of yet, but I'm also sitting on a university internet connection, so speed is rarely an issue.

Mind you, I would still have trouble describing the forums as fast...

I don't generally have issues with the speed of my internet connection and have had no problems at other sites, which is why I wondered if there was a problem here.

I haven't experienced any problems. I'm using Firefox and am on broadband. I had no problem with IE7, either.

Nay problems here lad, I'm on Firefox.

There have been ads displayed for a few weeks now, which is new. Perhaps it's related to that?

The past few days it's been very slow for me too (I use Explorer). Today is ok so far.

No problems here for me, and these are one of the faster forums I visit.

There are rumors that Level3 is having problems, so maybe you're having routing issues?

Level3?

I think they used to be called Level 9, but the state of adventure games meant a few cut backs.






;)

I'm going to get this all wrong, but I'll have a go anyway. Level3 is one of the backbone providers on the internet. If you trace your connection from your computer to its destination and back, you'll likely find it crossing networks owned by AT&T, Level3, and so on. If any of these huge backbone providers go down, large amounts of the internet cease to function properly. Namely domains fail to resolve and so on. To get a picture of the "health" of such backbone providers, stop by Internet Health Report. The most recent major failure was a few days ago, which could possibly explain your issues with the forum. But if your problems have lasted for more than a brief six-eight hours on the day Level3 went down, I'd say it's something else. Like many people have posted before, I personally haven't noticed any issues.

I've had problems with pages only half-loading or loading slowly on occasion since the forum upgrade as well - not in just the last couple of days. I thought it was just me though, as it only seemed to be happening when I was at work.

I doubt "me too!" posts are very useful, but I haven't had any problems at all. The AG forums are actually very fast compared to certain other sites, and long may it continue!

Edit - Actually, a few times now, the page has loaded as far as the top banner and then hung for ages. But this has been accompanied by getting kicked off IRC, so I dunno what's going on!

I have had occasional problems as well. My guess is that it has to do with the Doubliclick server that does the ad for AG forums. I have had similar hung ups in other sites (forums and non forums) while the ad service server loads the ad before the actual site content loads. With Doug in charge, I'm sure AG runs a tight ship so the problem has got to be something like that. Overall, the problems only happen every once in a while even at work through the corporate firewall and they haven't been really that bad.

Yeah, the fact that it seems to happen only to some people and only on some requests seems like it would suggest the new ads are the culprit. Out of curiosity, how many of you with issues are also having problems with Idle Thumbs? Both sites are on one server, but Thumbs doesn't have the new ads, so if you're seeing problems here but not there, that should settle it. Hopefully :)

:) Sorry to add to the muck, tabs, but I've been having loading problems too (often have to refresh the load). I also use IE.

And are you having problems with Idle Thumbs as well?

Every once in a while, the Forums page hiccups and doesn't load right (not often though so I can't correlate it to any other events happening on the page-I'll keep my eye out though:)). I don't have any problems if I visit Idlethumbs.

Hopefully that helps.

(I haven't had any problems with the Thumb forums since the vb3.5 upgrade which is what I'm assuming you're asking about, and I use the Thumb forums very frequently)

It doesn't seem like the problem has anything to do with the VB update. The hick up always seem to occur right before the ads (either the Google one or the banner one) starts loading. It's gotta be the ads. I've had no problems at the Thumbs either.