I’m not sure whether this belongs here or in ATMB, but I don’t think the latter gets much traffic so I will try it here. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it seems to happen on in SDMBs. I go to a thread, read through the postings (or many of them) and then try to go back to the forum. Back arrow seems to have no effect. Then I right click on the back arrow and see that the last 20 screens seem to be all the thread I have just been reading. So I click on the last one of the 20 and then right click again and maybe, just maybe, I will finally see the name of the forum near the bottom of the history.
As I said this doesn’t always happen, maybe half the time. I am using the Mozilla browser on Win-10.
Has this happened to other Dopers and can anything be done about it?
Sometimes if you click the back button and hold it, you will see a bunch of ads in the drop-down list.
What happens is that the back button is working, but it goes to an ad or script that invisibly redirects to the current page, so you don’t actually see any change.
This happens any time you have a page that forwards you to another page. As was already mentioned, when you click the back button all you do is go back one step, which takes you to a page that forwarded you to where you were, so it looks like the back button didn’t do anything.
This isn’t necessarily anything nefarious. Advertisers do it a lot because it allows them to quickly and easily redirect you to different ads. News sites will often forward you to a more recent version of a story if one exists. Sometimes when someone makes a web site they’ll use a temporary placeholder for something. When they have the actual content they want finished, they may just make the placeholder automatically forward you to the new content.
You can also have pages that automatically reload content to keep themselves updated to real time events or for some other reason.
This isn’t unique to the SDMB. This type of forwarding shows up in a lot of places.
I don’t recall any of that type of forwarding being used by the SDMB, so if you experience it here it is most likely coming from an ad.
ETA: Since it comes from ads here, an ad blocker will kill it.
You also might want to get used to tab browsing. Open threads in tabs, and just close the tabs when you are done, and the forum page will still be there in its original tab.
I’ve found that some kinds of forwarding/redirecting leave a phantom page in the history (that you can’t go back in one step at a time), while others do not (and thus let you use your back button seamlessly). I’m not sure of the details: I think that the seamless one uses server-side coding, while the phantom-page type is done in (easier) HTML.
What I find most annoying is that sometimes I have so many duplicates that I have not choice but to quit and start SDMB from square one. I find it so annoying that I don’t come to SMDB as often.
Another “feature” of this annoyance is that once I get back to the previous page, a right click only shows one forward page, not the twenty that I had to wade through.
While I understand SMDBs desire for more ad money, it does leave me with contempt for the web site.
In Firefox right-clicking on the back-arrow will bring up a list of previous urls on that tab. Just click on the SDMB link, thus avoiding the 3 or 4 ads which may be listed above it and which you’ve been visiting (and adding to) every time you clicked the back-button normally.
That doesn’t always work. Sometimes, I find it necessary to go back 10,20, or even 30 times. Since the right-click only shows the last few, it is quite annoying to take a plethora of clicks.
Wow, that’s a lot. It doesn’t surprise me though. I use Noscript now, which lists the sites that it’s blocked from loading. I went on CNN the other day and noted that it had tried to load 22 other sites along with the CNN page. The SDMB is way better in comparison. Besides the usual google services (google-analytics, googleadservices, googletagservice) it only has about 5 others, which I do block (viglink, quantserve, exelator, chartbeat, rubiconproject).