The last few days, it seems, the site has been slow to load pages for me off and on, and sometimes when I comment it stays gray in some sort of limbo, if and until the comment finally takes. Other sites seem to load as speedily as usual, and I’ve noticed the SDMB slowness across devices (iPad, desktop PC).
I have seen it a few times in the last couple of days. However my email was downloading slow and my other online activities were acting up at the same time.
So probably not SDMB in specific. Maybe just the Chinese gently testing a new cyberweapon against US infrastructure.
Haven’t noticed anything, personally, here in Oregon. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but maybe it didn’t affect everyone…?
The Discourse status page shows no major issues over the last few days: https://status.discourse.org/ (SDMB is hosted on Discourse).
But these things are frequently ephemeral and/or regional, often affecting only some people and not others. A simple test you can do is to try tethering your laptop to your smartphone’s cellular data plan instead of your home wifi, which will force it to go through different networks to get to the SDMB,. Or you could try a free VPN like Cloudflare WARP, which will also route the traffic through different networks.
The internet is an amorphous blob, a digital slime mold in a dirty petri dish, constantly losing and regaining tentacles… it’s a wonder it ever works at all.
Oh, those silly Chinese. Don’t they know they already have the best cyberweapon against us? If they simply told Tencent to turn off their servers, overnight we’d have a hundred million lost gamer souls freaked out of their minds, roaming our streets in panic… 'tis the stuff of revolutions…
…not to mention TikTok…
I’ve noticed it at times, even though both my internet connection and desktop computer are very fast. Nothing too drastic, but I do occasionally see the little flashing dots on my desktop computer which in the past I’ve only seen on my slow wireless tablet. And yes, sometimes when I post, sometimes I see a ghostly gray image of the post for up to a second. But it only happens on rare occasions and I don’t consider it to be an actual problem. All other sites are running at normal speeds.
I don’t believe that anyone who invented something as delicious as General Tso’s Chicken is capable of evil. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, he may have been a lousy general, but he was a hell of a cook!
I’ve noticed this late last night, and today. Replies and edits take a few seconds to upload, and sometimes get hung up entirely, both of which are atypical for my usage of the board.
Tso’s chicken was invented in NYC in the 1970s. Yes, it was by ethnic Chinese immigrants. But they were sorta Americans by then.
There used to be a fun documentary on Netflix about it: The Search for General Tso (2014) - IMDb (not sure where it these days… maybe YouTube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3fH9zdXE1k)
See, this is why the internet is slow. Somebody asks a question about some slow obscure forum and it spawns a discussion on ancient Chinese warlords and their sugary fried chicken. How can the modems keep up?!
With the amount of sugar in that stuff, the modems are sure to become diabetic.
I’ve definitely noticed the slowness, and I’m on 1.5Gb fibre so I know it’s not on my end.
No issues for me.
Yesterday there were a number of communication glitches due to a solar flare. Other than that, if you’re as old as I am it’s just you being slower.
There is definitely something broken in a recent update. I occasionally get the rotating icon when scrolling through threads for minutes at a time, in fact causing me to give up and restart the session. Why is this when I have a quad-core i7 at 3.4 GHz and an 800 Mbps internet connection?
Any prolonged response delay is a sign of a lost packet and browser & server getting out of sync. Don’t just sit there watching spinning past a handful of seconds. Refresh and miraculous healing will almost certainly occur.
I was going to say I haven’t seen a problem. But literally in just the past 10 minutes there have been very noticeable delays, both in leaving posts and in opening threads.
I’m just one state north of you. When you posted this, I didn’t have problems yet either.
Maybe it’s based on time zone?
But yeah, up to 10 seconds trying to save a post at the moment.
I think it must be the tariffs hitting us Canadians.
I haven’t noticed any problems. And I’m in the UK !!
Refresh, reopen, and if necessary, reboot. That’s my bad internet connection mantra.
The issues continue today. I’ve noticed that in some long threads I get to a point where the remaining posts are represented by grayed-out avatar shapes and bars representing text trying to load. If I hit refresh in that situation, the page will get stuck trying to load again. Closing and reopening the tab seems to help at times. Other times I just have to give up for the time being and come back a little later.
Another thing I’ve been noticing is when I’m typing a post, I keep getting a window saying “draft is open in another post” when that is definitely not the case. If I hit “reload”, part of my post is wiped out.
Also, this very post stayed gray when I tried to post it for 5 minutes. I finally hit refresh and it appeared as an unposted text. Here’s trying to post it again…
ETA: It only took a couple seconds to post the second time, but when I hit the pencil icon to edit and add this ETA, it took about a minute for the window to reopen.
Just confirming that there’s definitely an issue which I presume is due to a recent update. Again, not a really serious problem, but some annoying delays that weren’t there before. The two that occur most frequently are the rotating “wait” icon when scrolling up through threads, even short ones, and the occasional greyed-out text that persists for as long as a minute when making a post. The site is overall more sluggish than it was before.
This is bog standard behavior for a bad internet connection. Good bet it’s something at your end, not the server end.
That message is another proof that your connection is flaky.
While you are editing a post, every keystroke is sent to Discourse so they can keep a draft copy of your post up to date matching your local copy. If those get out of sync, that triggers the error message you see. It’s a poorly worded message because it assumes one particular cause out of many. And frankly, not the most likely cause.
When you get that message, always choose [ignore], never the other options. Ignore means “trust the copy here in my browser, not the (obsolete) copy on the server.” Conversely, [reload] means “throw away my work here in the browser and send me a fresh copy of the last version the server had before our connection became wonky.”