New BYC death on slow connections, slow computers; site crashes and hangs web browser...

[exop]

Sorry if this has been said before, but but whatever is going on behind the scenes in the new BYC forum web pages... is crippling my computer. The new BYC forums are almost unusable for me - especially message posting or PMíng. It seems to have gotten much worse sinc the advent of large, loud animated flash ads. ...Which, by the way, turn on for me *all* the time, not just when I hover. Whenever my mouse goes near them . Whenever it moves .They are more bandwidth than my setup here is meant to take... I know we are all supposed to join BYC a a sponsorsip level and then after paying the money, we can turn off the ads, but perhaps you haven't seen how these ads are not simply advertisements but are actually crippling people's BYC experience... mine and probably some others as well. for example, right now I am typing a message to be posted on the Byc Website &Forum Feedback board , but all that displays in my message compose window is the letter "S'. For "Sorry" .

I can't tell you how many articles and PM's I have tried to send or post over the past year, only to give up in a state of disbelieving frustration. It has taken me more then HALF AN HOUR to post the message which I have written so far.
... there must be something you can configure at your ened to make the BYC site more digestable for computers which are not the best, newest, or brightest, and are not on the fastest internet connection. A site aimed at chicken hobbyists really shouldn't presume that we all have the setup of a wealthy 25-year old tech hobbyist.

Text input is simply not being handled in a resource sensible way... I know you, the BYC staff did not write your own forum software, but surely you could configure it to be , maybe, a little less resource demanding. Less javascript, javascript, transparent popup windows; use just plain text imput areas instead of whatever unfathomably slow text input processing in being used now. Text input has always been something web browsers do wonderfully well, even the old, primitive web browsers of the 1990s. Never seen it kill a browser up to now.

Total time to compose, wait to read the text, delete typos and post this message: 1 hr and 8 minutes

 

[obeloinkment]

Quote:

 

[AmyWho]

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/
http://www.harmonycentral.com/t5/Drum-Forum/bd-p/acapella-19
http://bikeportland.org/forum/

Here are 3 links to forums that I look at the most.
From these links you will find that:
A) I'm a hipster.
B) These 3 places have plenty of ads to offeset costs and NONE of them take over your screen.

 

[carrieb62]

Notice that some folks who have nothing meaningful to contribute to the issue at hand other than pimping paid membership and calling others ungrateful and complainers are themselves non-paying members. LOL

I'm grateful for everything. Even a bad day alive is better then a good day dead. I think the Lord for that each morning when I don't wake up dead.

So let's get down to business.
I'm not having popups. People who are getting popups have some kind of advertising & tracking spyware infesting their puters, not BYC's fault.
Followed Ivan3's links and Nifty-Chickins detailed instruction but it didn't help me any.
My puter is not a Ferrari but it's not a Model T puttin along on the interstate either.
Running XP with IE 8 on wireless dsl connection, supposedly one of the faster connections that CenturyTel offers. Network status is 54mbps.
75 gb drive
12 gb used space
61 gb free space
.99 gb ram
Only add-on running is Java Sun Microsystems
11 startup items. All AVG antivirus and systems related.
I run a bare bones lean clean machine, no resource hogging programs installed. No MicroSoft Office, Word, Outlook, dancing baby screensavers etc installed. Don't game, porn, email or Skype on it. Dump cache & defrag regularly.
Pretty sure that ad causing my grief is the one at the top & bottom right in the topic threads. Before it runs a video bogging my puter some of the url are:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/13491871357336609013
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/4205721410776130453
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/16673576424451362657
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/7232891201934442605
I can't copy the url when the video starts because when I right click it for properties it says (I assume it's from Google):
Settings
Global Settings
About Adobe Flash
I don't mouse over it or interact with it. At random times it simply starts playing video & sound. I can be in the bathroom or kitchen and hear my puter start playing music and a woman start talking about Dr Martin shoes etc. Seems the ad is buggy because it skips & freezes up and sounds like gibberish.

Not everything Niftychicken asked for but hopefully enough info to solve this issue. Thanks!

Hi there, how old is your computer? I'd like to make a suggestion if you don't mind... I see your RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory it only .99 which is basically 1GB (gigabyte).
RAM is memory that used to store data waiting to be processed by a computer's CPU (central processing unit). There is a lot more data on video & webpages nowadays than what there was 2-3 years ago. When there are multiple things happening at the same time on your computer waiting to hit the CPU, and if your RAM is too small, it can get bogged down like you described. It's like the RAM is a funnel - you pour something into the funnel too much & too fast at the same time it hits the top quickly and you have to stop and wait for it to go though. Am I making sense? Anyway, maybe if you try doubling your RAM for 1GB to 2GB this may help. Yes, I'm a little bit techno geek!

 

[obeloinkment]

And you are correct!!! Even with my error, not Athlon but a Celeron instead - my trusty Linux is still faster! With Linux I don't have to run anti-virus in the background hogging precious memory & processing! Now I love my Windows for Photoshop and a few other small programs I can't get (yet!) with Linux. But for the general computer user who emails, surfs, watches video, etc., it's not a bad operating system - my 11 year old loves it more than Windows too! I've revived "dead" computers with Linux that wouldn't install or boot Windows because they were too old!

You do know that Mac OSX is just a pretty version of Unix (BSD Flavor) which is the OS upon which Linux is based, right? You can have *nix + Photoshop all day long.

 

[exop]

Just want to mention that 1GB of RAM is extremely small - even if using virtual memory - for today's operating systems.

"Today's operating sytems". Whose "today's operating systems" are these?

Chickenlegs, I am right there with you in my loincloth, had an Inspiron until last spring, when the screen backlight died, and upgraded it to a chronologically similar Latitude so I could simply swap out the hard drive and continue using the same computer. Windows XP, not the greatest OS but for the most part problem free for web browsing. My system is at 2G RAM, which is actually *the maximum* the hardware will support or even recognize. For all you new computer owners, 2G of RAM was not so long ago considered to be insane overkill, something you would need only if you did professional graphics work.. For Windows XP, it is much, much more than enough.

I'm excited by the number of responses to this thread... I expected some people would post saying "you are ungrateful it is a free site it is great and you are a weenie". Well, they did. And I probably am. But I notice that a bunch of these responses are from people who joined in 2012 or 2013. To these folks I would like to say: I forget the exact date of the site upgrade, but in 2011 the BYC forums ran different software; I would have hesitated to call it "blazing fast" at the time, but it is looking that way now. There were still ads; they were non animated ads which you could click on, and sometimes I did, of my own free will. I also visited several of the site sponsors' websites - which I was interested in because they were chicken related. I do think BYC is a good resource, and I've been participating in that resource since 2009. It pains me to see the site becoming harder to use.

Posting to the new forums was significantly slower for me from the get go. I lost a number of long, carefully thought out responses when the page crashed in mid post, and the experience was so depressing I simply gave up rather than try again. I've done a little research and suspect it may be a memory leak or sloppy coding in the new forum software, which probably expects IE to manage memory in a competent way (ha!) I may have to try Chrome again. The last time I ran it, I found it a little irritating and they were still working out bugs.

When the large, auto activating flash ads were added, it made page loads much slower. And Blackheart Rum, Arm and Hammer Kitty Litter, Wal-Mart and a YA drama about Bling Something are not smart targeted advertising for this site. Especially when they are accompanied by a darkening of my screen, a blast of synthesizer music and an interruption of what I was doing, and when my mouse was inches away from the ad activation area the whole time. This phenomenon is probably what the people on this thread meant who have complained about "pop ups".

I have escaped the worst of it for now, by telling Internet Explorer that I do not have Flash installed.

Editing posts and PM's is still incredibly slow, though. I edited this message elsewhere and cut and pasted it in... the experience of sweating, swearing and clawing at my face as I wait for text to appear, at the rate of one letter per minute, is not worth enduring except for demonstration purposes.

A final note, most of the content we BYC'ers see, read and write are short passages of ASCII - often short works like "my bantam leghorn Kiki is so CUUUTE here she is I am hoding her". Accompanied by a 400x600 pixel picture. Believe it or not, this is material we could have read on the web in 2000... without our ancient, primitive computers breaking a sweat.

I am all for BYC trying to be the best it can be, but making it bigger and heavier and slower is maybe, unnecessary, when you look at what people come here for. Answers, pictures... and each other.

 

[obeloinkment]

No I did not know that, but thanks for the tip! I don't own a Mac, I run on limited budget which has required me to obtain computers from thrift stores, and well, I've had trouble finding Mac anything there!

That is the beauty of a Hackintosh... you can run Mac OSX on most PC hardware, however, there are some specifics and a little fenagling to be done. It's a great project though!

http://www.hackintosh.com/

 

[AmyWho]

I've been on some pretty ad heavy sites before, but none as overpowering as these.
While my experience has been nowhere as traumatic as yours, I do find it to be super obnoxious.

I have blazing fast internet speeds but to have to pause, wait for it to load, then close the ads....I don't know how much longer I can hang before I seek out other forums and resources.

 

[Valk]

I'm not trying to be rude at all, but this free service works really well for me. In the age of the Internet, things change, update and upgrade fast, and everyone should try to update when they're able, not expect technology to lag with them. If you're stuck on a slow connection or machine, type out posts in a text editor, then copy and paste to the website and enjoy BYC.

Again, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a fine website and no one here is entitled to it, even though it's a very nice, free service. Oh, yes, viewing ads is how we pay to be here, but it's not that bad. I think we should all be grateful for BYC.

 

[AmyWho]

While I do agree with you, I feel like they could choose better ads. Many of the users of this site have awful backwoods internet connections. I would be much more likely to pay if they would try a little harder to help users..well...use the site.