Originally Posted by
FullOppositeRudder
After a few days using the new format PPRune, I feel I must be missing something. It works fine for me; it's as fast as it was before, pages load instantly, and I'm sorry, but I really can't find too much wrong with it. But then my requirements are simple, and by no means am I a 'power user'. I've only used it on my W7 desktop. My primary browser is Firefox, but I have sampled it using Chrome - my reaction there is essentially the same. Advertisements? Well there is a fix for that, and I've using it for years in Firefox. I do see the ads in Chrome but I can't really complain about their placement or frequency.
Normally I'm very reluctant to find much good about software revisions which come my way. Perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps I'll find the problems others report when I get out the laptop or fire up the amateur radio computers. But for the present anyway, it ticks the boxes for me.
Thanks to the mods and the others behind the screens who are working on the reported issues
.
FOR
PS. Please be careful in even thinking about incorporating a "like" button. That probably means there will have to be a "dislike" button too. This could in time turn the site into the sort of punchup which happens on many Facebook type sites where things go off the rails very quickly. This board style site has a lot going for it.
You've probably got a reasonably fast internet connection. I tried it on my tablet with a decent 4G connection (meant driving half a mile to get a signal...) and it works as you describe, pages load reasonably quickly with no major issues.
However, at home on our pretty slow broadband the forum is barely usable, because the myriad of adverts between posts, those with moving graphics etc, all seem to have to load before any page content will full display. In some cases pages were just hanging, and not loading at all.
Switching an adblocker on fixes things, and the forum then works pretty well, but that seems a bit unfair, as it's the ads that pay for this forum now. The ads weren't a problem with the old version, but something related to this upgrade seems to have caused the ads to have priority over the content, slowing things right down when you only have a slow connection.
Interestingly, it doesn't seem directly related to connection download speed, but more related to latency. Typically every page on this forum has a script that seems to send around a dozen or more requests to servers other than the host server for PPRuNe. Most of those requests are calls for adverts from advertising servers. Some of those advertising servers seem to be slow to respond if you have a slow connection, which then seems to cause the page to stall, whilst the ad server gets it's act together and sends the full ad. Once the ad that's been holding things up loads, then the page loads OK, but this can ten tens of seconds, or even longer (I had one page that took over ten minutes and still hadn't loaded).
So the fix that a lot of those users on slower connections are going to adopt is to install an adblocker, which works very well, but seems a bit like cheating to me, and trying to get something for nothing.
It does seem that most of the changes that are annoying some are directly related to increasing the number and frequency of adverts. The bar down the right hand side it just advertising space, and it seems to be the adverts inserted between posts on a thread that are causing most of the slower page load times.
In my view I'd have thought that there has to be a balance between adverts that are seen, so generate revenue for the forum, against adverts that are so intrusive that they slow things down to the point where people start routinely using an adblocker just to get the forum to work, so the multitude of ads then never get seen, thus depriving the forum of revenue.