odd change to web page title...

[NetworkGuy]

Just looked at my browsing history to go back several pages and having clicked on a new post in a thread I was on, saw the page title had been set to #25522643#25522643 (ie no mention of Mumsnet, nor the actual thread title).

Looks like the Tech staff need to fix something, somewhere...

[DamianTech]

That's intriguing. Can you tell us the URL of the page you were on?

[ChaosTrulyReignd]

I get this frequently, I notice on the tab of the MN page I'm currently viewing, there's a line of numbers like NetworkGuy has just posted rather than the thread title.

[NetworkGuy]

Using MS Internet Explorer browser, just in case it is important.

Here's just an example web link where I clicked the link from a search for iPad and iPhone (in the earlier case it was a link from a list of threads I'm on, but I wanted to double check what happens)... yes, as I thought (IE I didn't imagine seeing a sensible looking page title first time)...

Anyway, clicking the link, initially the 'page title' is showing Mumsnet etc, but after a short time, the title alters to show the post number being displayed.

I assume this might only be happening to some posts (depending on whether you have split some database handling for MNet and GNet) and now looking at the title of the current page, (where I am typing in this response) I see the title has been 'corrupted' and shows

Site Stuff | odd change to web page title... | Mumsnet Discussion#25524156

I don't think the post number was ever displayed before... it's actually quite handy but of course looks a little odd :) I've saved an image of the browser window complete with this odd title in case of query.


plain text copy of the link I followed, just for completeness...

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/geeky_stuff/1216632-iPad/AllOnOnePage#25455169

[NetworkGuy]

Not sure yet but whatever you've done, it looks like it has fixed it (though page loading seems quite slow at the moment for me, indeed unusually slow though others have been complaining for a few days haven't they!)

... a few minutes later after page loads, like treacle ...

No, I was wrong. The TAB was showing Geeky stuff, the browser window name was www.mumsnet.com/Talk/geeky_stuff/1216632-iPad/AllOnOnePage#25455169 and now (after visiting Thinkbroadband.com to have a completely different site and see that that looked OK) I see #25455169#25455169 displayed as both browser window and TAB title.

[NetworkGuy]

Oh, now looking on the list of pages, I see it was cured for a bit but is broken again now.

Are you experimenting with some load balancing, and one server has different code in it :( ?!?!?

[DamianTech]

It looks like this is a known bug in IE. It occurs whenever a Flash object loads, so on some Talk pages it won't happen but on others you might see it appear three times or more. You can also see this effect on Adobe's site.

Unfortunately, the only workaround for this is to embed something in every Flash file on the page. As nearly all of our Flash content is external (YouTube videos, advertisements) there's no way we could do that for Mumsnet.

I don't know if IE 9 is affected by this, I only tested up to version 8.

~D

[NetworkGuy]

As I don't use Vista or Windows 7, I could not use MS IE v9 or later anyway :)

I generally don't use MS IE except in situations of last resort, but then again, I normally block Flash as well, if I am using Firefox (which is used in about the same proportion of times as using Google Chrome or Opera).

Thanks for the explanation. Never knew of it before (but then again, don't generally use MS IE because of the opportunistic BHOs which can be malware, key loggers, trojans, etc...

Just a fluke I was using it the last few days... time to reboot that PC and switch to linux.