MN constantly freezing and lagging, and unresponsive links.

[MarleyAndMarleyWoohooohooohooohoooo]

This has been an issue for a few weeks now in a bearable way, but it’s getting a bit worse lately.
Sometimes it appears to be adverts slowly loading and once they’ve appeared the site works again, but sometimes it’s stopping completely and nothing on the screen works at all and I have to swipe safari away and begin again. This isn’t happening on any other website.

I’m in the mobile version on safari. I’ve cleared cookies. I’ve turned my phone off and on again.

MN is still working for me on brave, but if I use it on chrome I get mccaffee pop ups. No pop ups if I use chrome without an MN tab.

That’s my worry too.

As a pp just said, these crashes/ freezes completely lock out your browser. It’s no good just shutting down the window and carrying on- no further internet is possible even once the window is closed. Something going on at a very deep level it would seem, and yet the developers at MN can’t even see this is occurring. Quite worrying tbh. The only way out on my phone is to force quit the app (swipe upwards) and start again.

I’ve already spent the time it took to send them a screen grab video of exactly this happening.

My phone also overheats whilst this is going on.

This is 100% advertising specific. It will stall as it's loading ads, including the "pretend threads, actual ads". I have to quit Chrome and/or Firefox to get it to work at all after it freezes, it's not intermittent for me, but every day. On a laptop it slows and delays, seems to recover better, but I've also had to quit too.

How are all of the racist trolls supposed to meet their quota with this mess?

Yup - when it freezes on a laptop and you go to Task Manager the % for CPU and RAM for the browser is ridiculously high.

ETA: This isn't a hack - it's shitty advertising coding. I quoted about the overheating on devices.

I recomend this browser
https://brave.com/
When I use MN on brave there are no pretend threads, no ads at all, no freezing or pop ups.

I'm posting this having given up on Chrome and switching to AdBlock browser for Android. No freezing or crashing the browser. No adverts including the adverts disguised as thread. The browser also lets you see how many adverts are blocked using it. It's blocked 33 adverts just on this page which is set to 100 posts per page.

Our of interest I had a look on a couple of other forums to compare. Digital Spy has 13 blocked adverts and another forum I use had 5 blocked adverts. Even the dreaded Manchester evening news website which is almost unreadable due to intrusive adverts only had 13 and the Guardian just had 1 in each of the pages I tried.

So could it be that's the answer? there's 33 or so adverts running on the page which would explain high CPU and RAM use as well.

That's interesting, I use ad blocker not their browser just the ad block function and in 10 minutes I have been on MN it has blocked 80 adverts.

I know MN don't like us using ad block software but the site is horrendous to navigate without ad blocker on.

My laptop also gets very hot and the fan works overtime when the freezing/hanging happens.

As I said earlier this never happens on any other sites it is MN specific, the issue is 100% caused by something within MN's set up.

Exactly this. Sort out the adverts, it is ridiculous. I know MNHQ need advertising revenue, but im fed up of the problems and if not fixed very soon, I shall be off.

Me too, I had thought it was my phone.

I'm absolutely not changing my browser for Mumsnet - WTF?

Seeing this happen in real time is beneficial to us because when it's happening we are able to ask you to do things in the browser which will give us much more insight about when this is happening

You seem to misunderstand what freezing means. You cannot do anything in the browser at all (chrome on android) other than wait for it to become unresponsive and close it down or force shut down in another way. I can tell you that whatever a developer asks me to do in a browser will provide no additional insight as it's not possible to do anything at all.

I also wondered about this. I'm not very tech savvy but I literally can't do anything but force close the browser when it happens so I don't understand how the tech team will be able to get me to do anything because there's nothing to do except close it??

As I've said before I'm happy to jump on a call if it will actually be beneficial but I still don't understand how them seeing my screen freezing will help and the message from Tech above doesn't give the impression they actually comprehend the issue?

Gransnet has none on their threads.. Thanks for flagging this up. Why are you doing this @MNHQ?

Please do not touch Gransnet.

Has anyone got a new bar at the bottom of the site now?

@Lonelycrab When I said that there were only two reports, I meant internally from staff at MNHQ.

@ZimbleFox Apologies, I didn't mean directly in the browser. I meant on the machine in general. Things like looking at Activity Monitor if it's a Mac to see which processes are taking up CPU and RAM.

I think it's worth reiterating that nobody is denying that these problems are happening, or saying that this isn't something to do with what's happening on site. But these problems aren't happening for everyone and not consistently for the people who are being affected.

As I said in my previous post, this is likely related to some rogue ads that are causing problems. Ads are different for every user of the site which makes replicating this to get to the bottom of it much more difficult. This is why we need the help of the people experiencing it so that we can fix it for everyone.

If someone who is experiencing this consistently would be willing to get on a call with me to show me it happening I'd really appreciate the opportunity to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks

Matt

Matt, I think your problem here is that as it's an intermittent issue people are rightly wary of giving up their time to have it not happen when they're on a call and "show it happening" to you.

Plus, given a lot of us will be browsing from smart phones, it's not quite as easy as having a rummage around the back end of a Mac or PC.

For me also, the problem really varies. Sometimes it can be fixed my minimising and waiting for an advert to load. Sometimes it will take out every window in the browser and attempts to navigate away are met with a blank screen.

I've attached some screenshots from yesterday but I'm going to be honest - I'm a busy person, helping Mumsnet fix a problem that seems partly to be caused by insufficient controls on its advertising but also very likely to be linked to the increasing overserving of adverts -you are getting towards Reach levels and it's having the same impact on user experience - isn't one of my priorities for the slivers of free time I do have.

I have posted on this before. I have no problems with MN on my iphone12, whatever browser I use. On my Ipad, MN on Google is unusable - the screen constantly freezes, or when I scroll down, the screen is just white. I have turned off the ad blockers and private browsing is no use at all.

I go on other websites with adverts and have no problems whatsoever. It is just MN!

I wouldn't be able to contact MNHQ because when it happens on my android phone the whole thing freezes and to have to turn my phone off.

There are lots of us who are having issues with this still multi times a day. It has happened a few times today already.

Does MNHQ have any idea when this will be fixed?

It does make me feel distrustful @rewilded I agree. I deactivated after one of the previous data handling mishaps. I’m wary too.

Same issue here - and it completely freezes the browser which is incredibly frustrating.

Any update on a fix?

@MattTech My theory is it is a Tui ad. The one with the kid in goggles. I’m sick of seeing that kids face freezing my phone.

Me again! I've been on mumsnet for the past half hour and had to reload 13 times ffs.
I can't find the last thread I was reading because I hadn't put it in my watch list, and even if I do find it I won't find where I stopped reading because I didn't bookmark as I went along.
I may have to defect to Netmums if this continues...

After maybe a week plus of it being OK on this device (iPad/Safari) with it being OK yesterday suddenly it was impossible to use the site this AM.

The solution (again, grrrrr) was to delete my browsing history and cookies…that seems to have fixed things to some extent.

Argh. It’s back. Has been OK for a while. Someone mentioned the tui advert up thread. That’s what I had to wait for. Please tell tui that having had to sit through that I won’t be buying anything they’ve got to sell.

iphone. Safari. No, I’m not clearing history again. It didn’t work the last time and was more of a nuisance to me than anything else.

Im another one having this issue and it makes the site unusable. I’m using Chrome on iOS

chrome version 132.0.6834.100
iOS version 18.1.1
iPhone 11

the as loading at the top of the page takes a minute or more and you can’t do anything until it loads. Then it does the same again when you click on a thread.