zitsky

Umm, thanks? Who in management is hearing about this?

IBobi

Bug reports go through me or @IBJoel to our tech support, who get to them as soon as they can.

zitsky

Thanks. That answers my question. But my concern is that no one in management is hearing about these problems, except maybe whoever is VP of tech support.

IBJoel

I have informed our tech and ad people of the continued auto-play/memory-hog ads. Please continue to post screenshots where possible, so I can keep pushing tech on it when needed.

gooselee

I have no idea which specific ads are causing issues, as I can still barely get any FT pages to load on my laptop. If it's not spinning for 2-3 full minutes before any content appears, I get a 2-3 second burst of audio...and then *maybe* some content appears...and then *maybe* the page will allow me to scroll down a bit before Chrome crashes.

Am now mostly browsing on my phone where the ads seem to be more limited. This really needs to be escalated within IB, though. It is a significant issue and seems to be getting worse and worse. I don't experience this issue with any other websites that I frequent.

IBobi

A major issue is, this is only happening to a handful of people. We are getting no other reports outside of this thread, and you can see how few there are. This indicates that it is either a very small edge case with FT, or it's your browser.

If you have not already, clear your cache and FT cookies. Try a different browser and see if this persists. This is not at all a widespread issue, and even if it is on our end, therefore it will be difficult to resolve.

GeezerCouple

Okay, I'll chime in, but <whatever the problem is> is manifesting itself slightly differently.
We might not be alone in not reporting because it's not/no longer "terrible".

I had incredible trouble loading pages some days ago, and that seems much better, but there is still a very odd delay.
Also odd, sometimes I can't get the thread to scroll. By the time it responds, I've clicked again, and then it suddenly double jumps... or triple/etc., depending upon how low I wait before "trying again".

Worse, when I have FT window/tabs open, *everything* else slows down, sometimes to the point of freezing, so I have to force a power off.
If I don't have FT open at all, "all is well with the world" (okay, all is well with the laptop, at least).

It's definitely FT website. It doesn't happen with any other website or combo of websites, unless FT is also in the mix.

Very annoying.

GC

gooselee

Is there somewhere other than this thread/support forum we should be reporting issues? This is a rather dismissive tone to take with the users who are helping generate IB's ad revenue AND who care enough to give feedback that could help improve overall performance/experience.

All I can tell you is that for at least one of your end-users, the same issues are occurring across multiple desktop browsers and devices. 15%-20% of the time the site works just fine. The other 80%-85% of the time it won't load or is slow to the point of being unusable. However, none of these issues persist when I load/use the site in its mobile format and they certainly don't occur on any other sites I visit (including other web forums). That is my issue report - if more testing is necessary, I'd expect IB to have a paid technical team ready to do that (and with the necessary time, access, and expertise).

FT is informative, sure, but ultimately it's a leisure activity that I'm happy to "pay" for by allowing reasonable ads to display at me. If what we're really saying is that the cases are few or minor enough that IB is willing to ignore them and lose users (or have us activate ad blockers and lose that revenue), I suppose that's your call to make.

IBobi

I feel your frustration with the issue you are seeing, but clearly this is the place to report these issues, as you have done. We are clearly working with whoever is reporting them, as indicated by our constant replies here. I realize it can be frustrating to have the same issue reoccur over time with no apparent resolution. But that doesn't mean nothing is being done. As I stated, this is a very difficult issue to even reproduce (we can't), which is the first step to fixing it, if it is on our end. We are giving out all the guidance we know to give so far, which is to change browsers, clear cache, clear cookies. Other than that, we've reported this issue to the appropriate teams who can actually try to fix this (I cannot). Let me know if there's anything else we can do for you.

gooselee

Meant to add last night (but gave up after trying to load for a while) - I appreciate the response and engagement, and obviously there are a few of us frustrated at the current state. FT has performed mostly flawlessly for me for many years, so it's mostly just disappointing that a site that has operated so well for so long is suddenly and consistenly becoming painful to use. And for some of us - it is exactly that: a recent developing that is quite consistent in a bad way.

Know that while many of us appreciate the efforts IB is making to correct these issues, it can be disheartening to basically hear "we don't think it's happening enough to be a situation worth our attention". Right or wrong, that's how I read some of the previous posts in this thread.

And literally in the 7-8 minutes it took me to type this (as the site kept freezing while I was typing), the activity bar in Chrome was continuously active. Here are some of the things that were indicated:

Processing request...
Waiting for secure connection...
Waiting for uat-net.technoratimedia.com... (seems to keep coming back to this one)
Waiting for rtb0.doubleverify.com...
Waiting for ?????.doubleclick.net... (the ???s change rapidly)
A few others that flick by too fast for me to read/capture

Even now as I'm going to click post, this activity is still occurring even though the page has been fully loaded for 10+ minutes.

IBJoel

Gooselee, thank you, this is something our tech team can work with. We need specifics like this. The more images, information, and so forth you can give us, the better tech and ad ops can work on the problem. It's OK if you guys don't know what ad is causing it. You can include pictures of all of them.

FlightNurse

I had my posting deleted on this board, why?

IBobi

Your post was about audio ads. It was moved to the proper thread
Report Disruptive 2018 Ads on Your Desktop Device - Please Post SCREEN SHOTS

IBJoel

Hello everyone. I experienced a major slow down on my test account, just now, and have sent tech/ad ops the details.

txpenny

I was having major issues with slow/non responsive pages a month or so ago.

Two weeks ago I set up a brand new mac book from scratch (no time machine restore). Evidently, I had some software not playing nice with macOS 10.13.3. I only bring this up as I had the same issues with slow/non responsive pages with the new install of Safari. Last week I change my settings to "Disable Infinite Scroll" and this site has worked like a champ since.

One other data point - before the change, Safari would crash intermittently when reading active threads. I would get a memory error message indicating saying something to the effect that the page got too large for memory (don't remember exact message).