For the love of God

[SerendipityJane]

please removed whatever script you have decided to put in place on AIBU, Chat and Brexit topics. It's choking typing to be 1/10th speed and making it nigh on impossible to type with any speed.

I'd guess it's part of a "bright idea" connected with similar threads. But it's shit and sub optimal.

Maybe get some grown up testers ? Because the kids missed this one.

This extra information along with other features added since Talk transformation can be too much for some devices, causing them to crash.

I'm happy to report that I've had great success by installing an an blocking browser on my phone and using that to read MN. I generally come back after a break to find the page frozen and have to refresh, but it's otherwise working well. So it appears all these 'features' are advertising-related.

Yet I can browse any number of other sites which are crammed full of ads and pop ups as well as lots of content, but still work well.

Perhaps the answer is to suspend the new features?

Especially as they seem to have been imposed top down from MNHQ, rather than being in response to user demand.

Then get the site stable and working with "view all" - a feature that users are demanding - and only add new when you have the issues sorted

This extra information along with other features added since Talk transformation can be too much for some devices, causing them to crash.

It is not the device. It is the mn site.

I hate to use this as an example but the Daily Mail online is a very ad rich all singing all dancing site that can scroll down to great depths without ever freezing my laptop even once.

When I use my work laptop (which has much more memory and computing power - apologies for the wrong techie lingo), I get the same problem with crashing and freezing and zombie typing on mn that I don't get on other sites.

Wild unsubstantiated guess here, but after the redesign I noticed there are a ton of live updates to the site now - in-thread notifications of new posts, updates on watched threads of how many new posts, fast updates of active threads, etc.

Is that feature the thing that's slowing the site down?

If so, I'd guess most users would happily do without that functionality for a while if it meant threads loaded faster, didn't freeze or crash, and it was easier to reply.

If not, ignore me

Ironically, this thread will start to crash soon as it's getting too long but, what are the other features that have been added? I'm just trying to use this place in the way I've always done.

Yeahhhh...this is not a device issue. It's 100% an MN issue. I use all manner of devices and "workaounds" (laptop, desktop, Android, iPad, varying OS, ad-block/no-adblock, normal/incognito mode, 25 posts/50 posts etc. etc.) and this is a recurring issue on all of them. But only on MN. As PP have said, other ad-rich/data-rich websites seem to do just fine.

I do appreciate that sometimes new website updates/upgrades can cause existing coding to go whack and break something in a way that's not immediately fixable, but surely the whole "viewing 100 posts per page = x40 more data" thing was true even pre-upgrade? So not really an excuse that flies with me tbh.

@partypeople Thanks for posting.

We're absolutely aware that it's a MN site issue and not a device issue. But the problem only affects some devices, depending on their specs and how the site is being used.

We're actively trying to fix the issue so that it works on all devices, and for all use-cases, but the challenges involved with that aren't straightforward as the issue is with a 3rd-party system.

You're absolutely right that viewing 1,000 posts per page also showed 40x more data on the previous site, so I wanted to explain why that wasn't a problem and it now is.

On both the old site and the new site, pages with 1,000 posts visible took longer to load because, as you would expect, it takes more time to retrieve 1,000 posts than 25 posts and more time to display them in a browser.

The previous site had much less interactivity on-page. For example, the posting box for messages on the new site has buttons to mention people, add emoji, format text and there are more options for uploading images etc. There are also more interactions on individual posts.

All of this uses more memory, but this doesn't ordinarily cause any problems.

Unfortunately, due to a problem with a 3rd party system, as pages are open for any length of time, the memory usage increases and ultimately the browser forces the page to either crash or reload.

This is why the problem is happening.

We're actively working with the 3rd-party and exploring alternatives to resolve the problem but this is going to take some time.

I can assure you that we're doing everything we can and we'll update as often as we have new information to share.

Thanks 😃

I thought it was all the vibrator ads loading that was slowing it down..😄

Wow. This thread is so old and still nothing has changed.

It's an unusable site. I can only assume tech is being paid to run it into the ground to reduce its value (for obvious reasons). As predicted, this thread of complaints is now too long to function it has taken 10x longer to type this than necessary..

@MattTech thanks for responding, and for the detailed explanation. Speaking only for myself, my frustrations were more to do with MN's general response than the technical issues themselves. I completely understand that revamping a site, integrating new features and making it shinier/more interactive etc. can impose greater demands on processing power and memory usage etc. And things do break, sometimes without explanation. These things happen.

Personally I was more frustrated by the response (or lack thereof) to many users' concerns and the attempts to suggest that it was individual users' setup that needed to change (change your devices, try a different browser, try clearing your cache/cookies, change the # of posts you view per page = all things that rely on the user to change their behaviour and imply that the onus is on them to force the site to work properly for them. And even then it wasn't solving the problem for many of us). It's fine to say that this may only be happening for some users/devices, and I agree that it may be so, but it is/was happening for enough of us that it was demonstratively a bigger deal than MN seemed to be making it out to be.

This is, in fact, the first time I've seen a proper detailed explanation for why it's taking so long to fix this issue, and I think that if MN had said so from the beginning, rather than reiterating the same refrain for months, I certainly would have had more patience.

Anyway, good luck with finding a fix, and thanks again for taking the time to explain!

@partypeople No problem at all.

It's been a really tricky issue to track down in all honesty!

Because it most often affects users who are viewing 1,000 posts per page and because of the nature of the problem, moving to fewer posts per page can often (although not always) reduce the problem significantly.

The reason for that is when viewing 25 posts per page, you generally stay on the page for less time before clicking through to the next page - which in turn resets the memory usage and starts the cycle over again. This, in most cases, stops the problem before it crashes the browser tab because you've already moved on to the next page of a thread.

I agree - our communication could have been clearer on this and it's something we're talking about internally.

I also appreciate how frustrating it is to have the same questions (predictably!) asked when there's an issue.

Because of the number of devices, browsers and settings in use we can't test everything on all possible combinations, so if we can see a pattern that people using Device X with Browser Y with setting Z are having the problem it helps us narrow our focus for isolating the root cause.

That hopefully helps to explain why these are the first things we usually ask; if multiple people are having the same problem and everyone is using the same combination, we can narrow our focus to replicate it.

The good news is that we have a new fix to test which we're aiming to release early next week. We hope that it will resolve the problem for the majority of users experiencing it but will update as soon as that has gone live.

Thanks again for your patience with this 😃

Oh no.im sorry the reply from mn was deff suggesting it was our problem.

In the olden days Tech used to get locked in the shed until things were fixed.

But yes thank you for the detailed explanation @MattTech.

and while all that is being looked at can we please please please have the issue of new paragraphs not having a capital letter automatically like they used to fixed?

Snigger

Thanks @MattTech - fingers crossed for the fix!

Also posted on one of the (several) other threads about this:

Really crappy today, just crashed on a thread of only 122 posts (despite being on a much loathed 25 post view)

Now "see all" is a feature that you know is much prized by MNers - to the extent that it was retained for "classic"

And it worked just fine in the immediate aftermath of the replatforming.

We want it working properly, just like it used to

Do think about how you prioritise a feature that users clamour for v new stuff imposed top down that no-one would miss (and which buggers up site performance)

Not to jinx it, but the site seems much, much faster and more stable today!

Also nervous of jinxing it, but I've also found that everything seems to working much more efficiently the last couple of days. I had been so hacked off with it, but am now feeling cautiously hopeful that I won't be giving up MNing as a bad job after all

I noticed this too, and yes, also nervous of jinxing it! 😅

I thought perhaps it was better as it's Sunday morning?

@LilyMumsnet @MattTech

As another poster asked. Is anyone looking into the Capitalisation issues now?

why isn't it doing it!!

it might seem minor,but it's bloody annoying. Getting into the habit of manually making it a capital causes issues with everything I type in/on.

After reading the last couple of posts on here, I've gone back to 'all posts' on a thread and it's loading much faster! 😀

Thank you @LilyMumsnet and @MattTech

Hi all...

We released a couple of changes to the site on Tuesday and Wednesday last week which should hopefully have improved the experience. It seems like some people (@noodlezoodle, @Blooboo, @partypeople, @WhoNeedsSleepNotISaidMyBody and @DuplicateUserName) are seeing an improvement which is great to hear.

We didn't post an update before now because we wanted to monitor the effects of the changes last week 😃

@WhoNeedsSleepNotISaidMyBody I know the auto capitalisation thing is pretty frustrating. Unfortunately, it's not an easy thing to fix as it's caused by a 3rd-party component in the text editor on site. I can assure you we're constantly looking into it, and we're also looking at alternatives - so hopefully we'll have more news for you soon.

If anyone is still experiencing the problems with the pages crashing we'd really like to know about it and, if possible, get on a call to see what you're experiencing.

Thanks so much for your patience on this - it's really appreciated.

@MattTech Thank you for your reply. The text cap thing is VERY annoying indeed, but slightly less so when I know you're onto it. Someone, a while ago, said that it had been dropped as an issue as we could do it manually🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

Anyway, good to know you're still looking into it ☕️ 🍫

I'm still getting huge grey spaces with 'Ad' (but nothing there) then the messages take a while to load.

older iPhone 6s but latest iOS & plenty of storage/memory etc.

I'll try to be more observant of what's going on. Brain fog is a killer so I tend to just find it annoying without really registering what it's doing.

Thanks, @MattTech. For the first time in months, I am able to leave MN open on a tab on my laptop and when I come back to it it doesn't crash. Phew. I might venture to go back to See All Posts instead of 100 posts per page.

So pleased to see this working better!

I've gone back to "see all" this morning, and so far, so good!