Note – sorry to stomp on my esteemed co-front-pagers!
Folks,
There’s something wrong with part of the back-end of the site and so I need to fix it. What, how, where – all great questions that I’ll answer (for myself) once I dig into it a bit. Hopefully it’s just a bad plugin that can be updated. Seeing as I’ve held off on updating the theme to a major new version, I am planning on doing that today.
What this means:
- The site may look different temporarily. In order to diagnose the issue, the first thing I need to do is set the theme to a generic WordPress theme. So if you see that, don’t freak out. It will be very temporary and is just a testing step that I’ll reverse within minutes.
- It is possible that I will have to, one at a time, try disabling specific plugins to see what’s tripping things up. Hopefully this won’t need to occur.
- Once I update the theme to the current version, I will then apply our customizations; this takes a few minutes and so the site will not look quite right (no comment numbers, meta content under a post’s title, etc. I will get those customizations reapplied ASAP. In some cases, it’s an easy copy and paste, but in others, it may be a bit trickier.
So, that all said, I know that many of you block ads on the site, but for those that do not block ads, do you see the video ad in the right sidebar? I know everyone hates it, but it generates a lot of site revenue. It is supposed to be there, but I don’t see it in my browsers, whether on pc A, B, or any of my iOS devices. I see from the code that the site generates that the code for the ad is still there, but since I don’t see it running, and cannot get to it from the back-end, I don’t know if it’s working.
I hope to add some links for getting involved as well; perhaps Doug! or some other frontpager will ask me to setup a sidebar widget with our top 20 targets/ActBlue, or something along those lines. I’m game.
I’m taking care of a few prep details before I begin work, so you won’t see any changes instantly, more likely over the rest of the morning.
I will be in this thread off and on, but please use other threads for general discussion not about the site/site issues/etc.
Emma
At first I saw a large ad but no video. The ad was for a systems security conference. After a few seconds a chocolate “news story” began playing.
Alain the site fixer
Is it between Follow and Archives?
Francis Logan
As soon as I scroll down, I see a series of thin darker grey hashed lines that overlay the background diagonally from upper left to lower right.
thruppence
I don’t see the video ad. I don’t run ad blockers but I generally use the latest version of Firefox on my Mac which has some tracking blocking built in and does not automatically load Flash. Which browser would you recommend?
SoupCatcher
I see a large ad, right above Recent Posts in the sidebar, but it’s not a video ad.
There is a space below Follow and the icons and above Archives.
Major Major Major Major
Sounds like you’ll be having a fun day.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: Don’t stray too far my friend, your help may be needed to customize another plugin (to address the issues with the reply button).
Alain the site fixer
I suspect that many browsers are blocking the ad, even without ad blockers. I just noticed it can be loaded manually in Chrome, so it is there, just not showing by default. Perhaps I can finally get this addressed.
Alain the site fixer
So, I do not need to update the theme to solve this issue; apparently Facebook changed their API so our old plugin was not working correctly and thus threw the back-end into confusion. I’ve fixed that and will take care of a few other things before I do the theme. So the theme changes are likely around noon Eastern, perhaps a bit later.
Thanks to all for your help and encouragement. Have a great day!
JThiel
Yes, the “annoying ad” is still showing between Following and Archives. I.m using Firefox 53.0.2 (32 bit). Didn’t expect my first comment to be about the “annoying ad.” :-)
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer:
In a non backwards compatible way, that’s rather surprising.
manyakitty
I see a video ad for the banner, and a large static one on the right.
Windows 10/firefox
OldDave
No video (yay?), but the large ad just changed from one targeted to me (not everybody is in the market for an oscilloscope) to one that’s targeted toward my id (BMW motorcycles).
manyakitty
Also, super crashy Flash
randy khan
No ad between follow and archives for me – Safari 9.1.3. on a Mac laptop.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: good point – as it turns out, the WordPress plugin we use is not from Facebook, so perhaps it was a bug in the previous build that he fixed. I’m editing my comment to remove FB-blaming.
Another Scott
@Alain the site fixer:
FB-blaming is always a good idea.
>;-p
Cheers,
Scott.
Nethead Jay
Blank space but no video ad between follow and archives. This is with Chrome 57 on Win 10.
craigie
Alain –
Is there some reason why you enjoy doing dev work on a live site? This is not how things are normally done…
Another Scott
@craigie: (Insert obligatory Bill O’Reilly video clip here.)
Cheers,
Scott.
GregMulka
@craigie:
The answer to your question is probably somewhere in here. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
GregMulka
I have play buttons on some of the ads. Chrome in Windows 10.
FlyingToaster
Video:
• Blocked in Firefox because it crashes the browser. Also that’s my work browser so it blocks a lot of sites (Doubleclick, Facebook) which takes out some ads as well.
• Blocked in Chrome because it crashes the browser. All the other ads are showing up fine.
• Missing in Safari — but the fan started up, which usually means something’s trying to load and failing. The ora.tv cookie is still there, so it ought to be showing up. All the other ads are showing and fine.
Box is MacBookPro OSX El Capitan with 16G Memory and 2.8 Ghz i7.
Mnemosyne
Adding this here in case you don’t see it above — I currently do not have a “reply” button on the iPhone. I can’t remember which OS I’m running, but it should be the most current.
fuckwit
this is why you have a staging site and a separate staging db
chris
Very late to this.
No video just a blank space. Chrome sez: This page is trying to load scripts from unauthenticated sources. (From the little shield in the address bar)
Up to the minute Linux Mint, Chrome incognito, adblocker disabled