External links mostly don't work for me

I’ve had this problem for a while now, but it seems to be much worse some days than others, and today is a bad day. When I click on any link within the SDMB that leads to outside of it (say, the links to dresses in this thread), more often than not I’ll get an otherwise-blank page with a boards.straightdope.com url and the error message ‘The requested URL /sdmb/189 was not found on this server.’ (I think the number varies.) Sometimes, when I close that page and click on the link again, it goes through to the intended page, sometimes not. Sometimes it takes 3-4 tries, sometimes it goes through on the first attempt. Is there some way that I can fix this? I’m running what I think is the most recent version of Firefox, 6.0.2.

That might be your problem.

vBulletin was written around IE and may not always be compatible with other browsers, especially as browsers advance over time, as this version of vBulletin is a few years old.

(No upgrade is on the schedule at this time.)

Links seem to be working for me in firefox 6.0.2.

It probably has to do with the ads. Rubicon and VPI (or whatever it is) have some real problems with their coding. It ain’t going to change, because the people that pay them (the advertisers) don’t care. In fact, they want it that way. They are the ones who do the spam and malware shit. This site gets paid by them, so has no incentive to bitch about it. So they don’t.

I get similar problems, too. I work around them, since TPTB can’t fix them, and ain’t going to change their ad brokers. Buy a membership, so you don’t have to load the ad code, or figure out the workarounds for the Ad brokers’ bad code. If you don’t know how, then bend over, and kiss your ass good-by. TPTB, here, don’t care.

If you’ll notice, GilaB is a charter member which means they have bought a membership and have on a consistent basis since 2004. I’m no technical whiz but the description of the problem sounds to me like an issue with the browser being able to find the url, not anything to do with ads.

I’ve been having the same problem, but since I also use Firefox, that might be why.

Unfortunately, you are incorrect. Even Charter Members have the ad code embedded in external links. I’m not exactly sure what purpose this serves since they don’t actually see ads, and I personally block this code, but it is definitely present. My guess is that it’s just hard to only enable it for Guests, and we don’t really have any full time tech people here.

What actually happens I am not entirely sure, but I know it has to do with the ad server not resolving. This could be because the board is busy, the ad server is busy, or even your ISP’s DNS is busy. And while it isn’t Firefox’s fault technically, it could be because Firefox’s timeout window is shorter than it used to be, so if it doesn’t resolve fast enough, it just gives up. Though this is more likely to just give you a hung page, rather than a different SDMB page.

The easiest solution to this is to download Adblock Plus. You don’t have to enable it on any page but the SDMB. You can’t see ads here anyway, so it doesn’t hurt anything.

I’d give you other solutions, but they involve knowing which specific server is causing problems, and I don’t have that information on hand.

The only thing I can tell you about is changing the timeout window. Type about:config in the address bar and press ctrl-enter. Click the “I’ll be careful” button if it appears. In the Filter box, type network.http.keep-alive.timeout, until it appears in the box below. Double click on it in the box, and change the value to 300. Click OK, and close the tab.