Okay, the video ad is gone. ? Ding-dong, the witch is dead. ?
I never experienced the automatic unwanted restarting, but I use my laptop most of the time. And I use two ad blockers.
So I was surprised to see how much faster Balloon Juice was loading on my laptop last night! So much faster that a few times I thought it hadn’t reloaded when I hit REFRESH. Is anyone else noticing this?
BJ had been mostly unusable on my iPad – even though it never restarted itself – but I tried my iPad last night and it was much more usable. So it’s better, but I am still getting the gaping white spaces as I try to scroll through the front page. Is anyone else noticing this? Or something similar?
I also couldn’t help noticing that Betty’s thread hit 300+ yesterday, which doesn’t happen on threads nearly as much as it used to. That makes me wonder how many people started commenting less because of the annoyance and frustration of automatic restarting. Can you chime in below and let me know whether that might have been the case?
As I said yesterday, John and I are both committed to resolving the problems once and for all.
I am aware that:
- the back arrow works inconsistently
- sometimes when you press reply it doesn’t always put @commenter in the box
- recent comments is not always up to date for you if you use Chrome, and possibly Firefox, especially late at night
- sometimes takes a while for new/revised comments to appear, both your comments and others
- sometimes the visual tab isn’t available, only the text tab
Let’s start there. Let’s take stock of where these 4 areas stand now that the video ad is gone:
Please speak up in the comments and let me know your thoughts/experiences in the 4 areas identified above: blue, teal, magenta, green.
There are a ton of different devices, different operating systems, different browsers, different browser versions, different ad blockers, and different browser add-ons out there. So it takes really good and very specific information to figure out what’s a site issue and what is a device/OS/browser quirk.
So can you help us out here? The more specific information, the better.
I plan to keep this post at #2 all day to make it more likely that everyone sees it.
Baud
I’ve had the green problems for a long time now.
The other problem I consistently have, which doesn’t have a color assigned to it, is that it often takes a while for new/revised comments to appear, both mine and others.
The Moar You Know
I hit Balloon Juice on a Windows laptop running Win10 with Chrome and AdBlock Plus, and with an iPhone SE also running mobile Chrome with no adblocker: no issues whatsoever in the last six months.
different-church-lady
I’m not: every time you’ve ever disabled or limited ads in the past, suddenly the entire site is turbo-charged. I have lots of aging devices in my life, and performance changes are very noticeable.
I get that ads are a necessity, but I’m not sure any of the ad services give a shit how much overhead they burden any given site with.
A successful parasite does not kill the host. It feels like web ad companies are headed in that direction.
Nicole
I have some green problems- mostly the trying to reply and the commenter’s name not coming up (and then sometimes the page reloading and the whole comment going bye-bye).
But my lack of commenting has less to do with challenges and more to do with there already being 100 comments by the time I get there so I figure in most cases, anything interesting I have to contribute was already said by three other commenters ahead of me. Doesn’t always stop me, but often does. Most of the time the site runs very well for me (usually Chrome). When commenting, though, I prefer to do it on laptop as quoting other people can be a bit of a hassle on the iPhone.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Yeah, I had planned to include the “comments not showing up right away” in the green set but got distracted. I’ll add that one now because I do think it’s one of the top 5 issues.
Can you let me know explicitly, though, whether there has been a change in any of the green items now that the video ad is gone?
I actually think that some of these colored items today may be/are likely related to ads that are not video. So the thing to do is identify exactly where things stand today with no video ad, so that if we turn off the other as for short period of time to test, everyone will be able to clearly see whether that makes a difference, or not.
Just Chuck
Sometimes when I press reply I still get the old-style dialog without the richtext editor and the instruction telling me to reload. Doesn’t happen very often though, and reload does fix it. macOS, Chrome, ublock origin and privacy badger.
different-church-lady
I’m not sure if this is the same thing, but for at least a year now BJ on my aging iPad goes “chunk…. chunk…. chunk…” for a couple of minutes at a time before all the content will load. It loads a few paragraphs, stalls for some dozens of seconds, then loads another few. Sometimes it just fails. Definitely seems related to how much Twitter embed is on the front page.
(Fourth generation iPad, OS 10.3.something.., I don’t have it with me right now…)
Scout211
Yes.
The only gaping white spaces on my iPad or Mac seem to be the spaces reserved for ads. There is a light gray border and the word “ADVERTISEMENT” at the top of a large blank space.
Only for the past few days when several of my comments were eaten by the auto-refresh. The auto-refresh has been happening on my iPad for many months, but not regularly or consistently. The regular and consistent was for the past week only.
Yes to the back arrow problem.
No to the @commenter not appearing.
Yes to the recent comments not up to date sometimes. I use Chrome on all devices.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I haven’t really noticed yet. I just tried the back button and it does seem to be working.
WaterGirl
@different-church-lady: I think we are talking about the same thing. It’s kind of hard to describe!
WaterGirl
@Baud: I know you might have other things to think about, you know, like your job, etc. But if you and others can really try to take note of how the (now) 5 green items – and the other 3 colors – are behaving over the next few days, it would be big help.
I’m hoping that if people can really pay attention this week and through the weekend that John will be willing to turn off all the ads for a week so that people have time to really notice whether the patterns change. Or not.
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl:
This comment reply: @watergirl did not populate, the cursor did not show, had to use text tab to comment.
I have most of the green problems, IDK if the recent comments are a problem because I seldom pay them any attention. Sometimes on a refresh I’m returned to the top of the page.
Win 10 desktop Dell PC, latest Firefox, AdGuard
Woodrow/asim
BJ loads much faster for me now (Win10/Firefox/Loads of privacy add-ons).
Not commenting a ton, but have seen that commentor reply issue (#2 of the green items) just today. That’s the only comment issue I can think of, at the moment, I’m seeing.
FlyingToaster
Blue problems: I wasn’t having those. See below for gatekeepers.
Teal problems: Only on iPadOS. And there’s usually (not consistent) an “advertisement” text holder at either the top or the bottom of the adspace.
Magenta problems: A little bit. Meatspace requires more of my attention, as we’re in the High School selection/tour/visit phase of WarriorTeen’s existence. Plus various family and associate stuff that needs attention. So if I start to comment and the page refreshes or won’t give me the visual box or whatever I’m a lot more likely to say “oh, FFS” and leave for less annoying pastures.
Green Problems: Everywhere, every device. I tend to assume that it’s Cloudfront, because BJ ain’t the only place exhibiting this. Lots of places are having inconsistent delivery related to content caching (the missing .css page phenomenon). And lots of servers are either getting attacked or having meltdowns (Apple’s FindMy server went down this am and told me WarriorTeen was at a church (‽) rather than at school; WeatherUnderground is losing the server that hosts all Watertown MA PWS every afternoon; et cetera, et cetera).
Devices as follows:
(Work) MacBookPro 16 last January (not M1); Big Sur; Firefox Latest, with NoScript/Ghostery/Disconnect for Facebook/CookieBro/CookieMaster; Chrome Latest with PrivacyBadger
(Travel) MacBookAir 13; Catalina; Firefox (latest for Catalina) with NoScript/Ghostery/Disconnect for Facebook/CookieBro/CookieMaster; Chrome (latest for Catalina) with Disconnect for Facebook
(Tablet) iPadPro 10.5; iPadOS 14.8; Chrome Latest; PrivacyPro Latest (from the folks who make Disconnect for Facebook)
(Mobile) iPhone SE 2nd gen; Chrome Latest. I don’t comment on phones, because I’m old and the keypad is too fucking small.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
@Woodrow/asim:
I’m on my phone, but it does seem faster.
eachother
Yes I had the white gaps and refreshing jitters for a few days on my phone. Gone now.
But I want to present all the colors to WaterGirl as thanks for your support.
The 3AM time stamp on your email tells a tale.
Jeanne
Had completely stopped reading BJ due to automatic refreshing on my iPhone using safari. Since ad is gone it has been great. Thanks! Don’t comment so not sure of other issues
WaterGirl
@jeffreyw:
Yeah, I’ll get to some of the smaller annoyances after we deal with the big ones that affect function. There will be time for those as well, I’m just not tracking them at the moment.
WaterGirl
@eachother: I love colors, so I will gratefully accept your gift of them.
scav
DEFINITELY faster (huzzah!)
I get the white gaps on many sites, for me they usually seem to be advertisements.
(if and only if I’ve been commenting less, it’s entirely due to angst, spleen and venom, and a vain attempt not to inflict it overmuch on others. Plus, the backsplatter.)
I’ll try to keep an eye for the green ones, but apart from general speed, I’ve not had many issues with the site. (there is a certain newish user, however . . . see magenta above and that’s with the liberal resort to baked goods.) (ETA, well, not specific to BJ, the entire interwebs has gotten slower to load and dodgy, but I’m not expecting you can fix that.)
iPad 7th gen, 15.0.2, Safari, AdBlockPro, Right-handed, fond of anchovies.
WaterGirl
@scav: Nodding.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
I like both parts of your comment. Because they are both true.
Ad companies think they need to be noticed more than anything else if they are going to be successful. And the more ads that we have in our lives the less impression any one ad makes. They have become very annoying background NOISE. And no it’s not that most of them haven’t been annoying for decades, even the one’s that somewhat entertain are. But everything in our society is supported by ads. The vast majority of my email is ads, of a different type-political, but they are ads none the less. Someone is always trying to sell us something, be it crap we don’t need or politicians that we don’t actually want, among the things/people we do. And when it gets to the overload stage, they all have to shout to be heard. And that shouting is in the form of obnoxiousness/intrusion. In our, and likely all other societies, we are at the obnoxious and intrusion level. “Must have” electronics has allowed us to be in touch, like it or not, 24 hrs a day.
Doug R
I know this is heresy here, but the unthreaded comments make it difficult to keep track of conversations and when I do comment, I have to search my name later to see any replies, if I remember to check.
So I don’t comment much.
hw3
Agree the site is much faster loading today. Cheers.
Baud
I just tried the back button on my computer and it’s working nice.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
My only current problem is the comment box. I often get the text box, when I comment using that it always posts the comment and then I have the visual box. I can comment using either but the visual box just works a lot smoother. iMac, Safari, latest updates, AdGuard.
Baud
BJ is faster on the computer too.
Barbara
Definitely having the GREEN visual versus text box issue, but especially for replies. For instance I am not having that issue in this comment.
WhatsMyNym
Extremely fast…
FireFox w/NoScript OR Brave on laptop running Windows10
Brave on Android phone
Baud
I just noticed on my computer that recent comments is still lagging.
Baud
I did just notice a slight delay in a comment appearing.
Amir Khalid
My main beef with the site remains the capriciousness of the commenting system. I am — still! — seldom allowed to comment in visual mode. As always, I have a Win10 laptop with auto-updated Firefox.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Thank you. The details matter, and knowing what’s still a problem will help us determine whether it is non-video ads or something else at the root of each problem.
SpaceUnit
FWIW, I usually view the blog on my Mac desktop and haven’t experienced any problems. Occasionally I’ll try to access it on my iPad but that hasn’t worked in a while now. The site just endlessly crashes and tries to reload. But this is a ten year old iPad that runs IOS 9.3.5 so I don’t have much in the way of expectations. There’s a lot of websites that won’t run on it.
For a time yesterday, however, my iPad was loading the site quickly and without crashing. First time in forever. I just checked and today it’s back to the old crash / reload cycle.
Make of that what you will.
ETA: To be clear, I don’t expect that a website should have to accommodate such ancient software.
Betty
I am not aware of having the listed problems on my older Kindle Fire, using the Silk browser. The restart issue appears to be resolved for me.
Matt McIrvin
I have not had, or at least been bothered by, any of these problems.
The only bug I consistently see is the one I mentioned earlier: if I go back and edit a comment after posting it, sometimes the last character in a paragraph (which is usually punctuation) will disappear.
I don’t know whether it’s happening now–I’ll test it
This is a test edit
Update: Yeah, it’s still there. The problem seems to be just that when you edit the comment and press return to begin a new paragraph in the editor, the last character of the previous paragraph disappears unless you then put it back in. This is a really minor issue, but I noticed it a while ago.
WaterGirl
@SpaceUnit:
That’s exactly what I experienced. Last night the site loaded quickly on my iPad. This morning, it’s back to the same issue as before. My iPad is older, but not ancient.
sxjames
Yes, the site is loading much faster this morning. Also, I’ve constantly had the problem of gaping white spaces when I scroll thru the front page. I just assumed it was just because I have a piece of shi…er, not very up to date computer, but lo and behold, this morning no gaping white spaces!
Running Windows 10, latest, with no ad blockers
WaterGirl
@sxjames: Wait, what? You had the gaping white space on a computer BEFORE the video ad was taken down?
I thought that was only a mobile issue.
Percysowner
So I was surprised to see how much faster Balloon Juice was loading on my laptop last night!
Posts with embedded tweets still take a long time to load the pictures in the tweets. That could be my adblocker. I never had the refresh issue and still don’t.
WaterGirl
@Percysowner: Posts with tons of embedded tweets will always load more slowly. Twitter has changed their code (several times) and there are multiple calls to twitter in each tweet, and then multiply that times the # of tweets.
What are you experiencing with posts that don’t have a million embedded tweets? Loading faster? Or no change from how it had been for awhile?
WhatsMyNym
@Percysowner: Twitter is always slow loading for whatever browser I’m using.
scribbler
I have the most trouble with the backspace when I have made a comment (which I don’t do often). After that, the backspace will only go back to my comment, for as long as I stay on that post. MacBook Air 2018. Catalina. Firefox.
WaterGirl
@scribbler: You seem to be speaking about how the backspace has been behaving over time.
Are you describing how the backspace is working right now, today? Or how it has typically behaved?
What I need is to know what issues there are now, TODAY and the next few days. If you could clarify that would be most helpful!
Kristine
I see this on my iPhone 7. It takes a while for the page to load, and often when I scroll down I see nothing but white. I scroll up and down a few times, and most times the downloads catch up and I’m good to go. Every so often, the page crashes. Sometimes the problem resolves when I do a soft reset of my phone. Occasionally, nothing I try works and I wait for that post to slide down the chute. Up to this point, I’d been blaming the odd tweet or link. Since I have Ad Block, I don’t see ads. But would the video ad keep trying to load anyway and somehow crash the site that way?
On my laptop, there’s a delay when I open BJ–I can’t start scrolling down for 10-15 seconds. I blame the ad blocker+Safari. When I go to the site on Chrome/no blocker, the page loads right away.
Nora Lenderbee
Same problem here. And it has happened today–but only intermittently.
The only other issue I have is that the Visual tab usually doesn’t let me enter anything.Windows 10 laptop, Firefox whatever the latest version is.
WaterGirl
@Kristine: Your description clarifies how it has always behaved until now, which is helpful.
But what I really need to know is how it is behaving NOW that the video ad is down.
Can you either let me know that you were indicating that it is still doing the same damn thing? Or that you don’t know whether it’s still doing that? Or that it stopped doing that when the video ad came down.
dopey-o
My ipad air 1 with ios 12.5.5 is running with no issues today. No lags, no reloads when viewing individual posts. However, the front page is still sloooow to load, and only 3 or 4 articles are visible. Wanted to view the Upper Penninsula article, but could only see the first few sentences.
It’s outdated hardware and an ancient version of Safari, but my BJ experience is greatly improved.
OT: do i understand that Apple doesn’t reveal the APIs for Safari, therefore Firefox, Chrome, Edge etc are just ‘wrappers’ for Safari? Being so frustrated in the past months, i have used alternate browsers on this site, and have found little difference.
Motivated Seller
Yes, I noticed the main landing page loaded much quicker. Not so fast that I doubted it actually refreshed, but pleasantly quick. I often avoid the main page altogether and click directly on the most recent post. I find that I can get to the content faster by opening up one post at a time (rather than waiting for, and scrolling through, all the “above the fold” content on the main page).
I use my iPad daily. I no longer bother waiting for the entire main page to load; the gaping whitespace that jumps around while each embed takes its time to launch is far too frustrating. Like I said, I click directly on the most recent post as soon as possible. Overall today’s iPad performance has improved.
I use an iPad Air, model A1474, running OS 12.5.5, and the default Safari browser. I do not use an ad blocker.
StringOnAStick
Kindle Fire with Silk browser; everything is working better, faster, no reloads. I was starting to just walk away from the comments because of the constant reloading frustration but that’s gone now, thanks!
sxjames
@WaterGirl: Yes, I’ve had it off and on forever. Like I said, I thought it was on my end so I didn’t bother to notice if it correlated with particular ads or such. But BJ seems to be working much faster/smoother this morning.
sxjames
@WaterGirl: Oh! Read some more comments and I need to clarify. The gaping white space on the front page was more like it took the page a long time to load, or the white space was later filled in with embedded twitter links. They were not permanent. Again, I don’t remember them being associated with ads.
Hope this helps (and not confuse)
scribbler
@WaterGirl: Sorry about that. You’re right, I was talking about how it has typically worked for me previously.
Today, backspace seems to be working correctly.
WaterGirl
@sxjames: Thanks, that helps.
FlyingToaster
@dopey-o:
Nope.
All MacOS (and probably iOS and iPadOS) browsers use “WebKit” to paint the browser window, which is the operating system’s web renderer. It’s a published standard to anyone with an account at developer.apple.com. It’s supposed to be HTML5/W3C compliant, but honestly, I’ve always treated this stuff as code once, debug everywhere. Of course, I used to try to get things to look the same on AltaVista and Internet Exploder, so I have very bad memories of “id browser, load customized layout stylesheet” and having to write 7 different versions of the layout to get approximately the same look.
BretH
IPhone 7 with Safari. Teal. Page loads with gaps but that’s understandable to me.
Main issue was bj would become unresponsive and reload and basically kill the browser and I could only recover after I rebooted the phone. This happened pretty much every other day
This has not happened since the recent change.
ChrisG
OK, no change whatsoever for me. Naked Browser with Java disabled on Android 11; and Waterfox 2021.07 on Windoze 7 with AdBlock Plus 3.11.2 and Flash Blocker Strict 0.1.0.
Might be worth mentioning that I never see ads, or images, or videos, just text.
WaterGirl
Big thanks to everyone who is commenting, please keep them coming. All the information is infinitely helpful.
CAM-WA
For me, on a 6th gen iPad, I wouldn’t say the site is loading much faster than it did before the video ad was turned off; perhaps a bit. What happens is that BJ will load with (sort of) placeholders for all the embedded tweets. That is, some text is in a box, but no images and not all the stuff that around (above/below) the text that appears first. It still takes a LONG time for the rest of the tweets to appear.
If I am impatient and start scrolling down before the images in the tweets have fully loaded, things start to go wonky. Sometimes large white space gaps, sometimes part of the page will go completely black. I find that recovering from this is spotty. Sometimes I just have to manually reload the page, and sometimes it resolves itself. I just have to be patient.
Ever since the video ads were turned off, the incredibly annoying spontaneous auto reload of BJ has stopped! YAAAAAAAAAAAY! Typically after 3 spontaneous reloads, I’d get a message saying something like “A problem occurred loading the page https://balloon-juice.com” and then the iPad would just sit there. When that happened, I typically said, “Screw it…I’ll try reading BJ some other time.” And I went off to Kevin Drum, The Atlantic, WaPo, etc.” I hope and pray that you don’t turn video ads back on until and unless this issue is resolved.
By the way, on my iPad, green vs teal text is very hard to distinguish. And figuring out which of the tiny little color squares is green and which is teal is no easy task, either!
Thanks for taking these issues on!
Scout211
Re: the giant white spaces. I posted upthread that the white spaces were there on my iPad but it looked to me like reserved spaces for ad placement.
But reading other commenters, I realize that there are two white space issues. One for ad space and one seems to be as a result of slow page loading when you first go to the site. I never paid attention to it because my internet connection is really slow so I just assumed it was because of my slow internet.
WaterGirl
@CAM-WA: Yeah, I know green and teal are too close, but the other option was orange. :: shudder ::
lurker
quick comment since I was checking in – have not reviewed anything on this thread other than the original post.
loads faster
had seen white space at times before video ad was disabled – at the time I was seeing it, it was obvious to me that it was space the browser had reserved for content it was still rendering – sometimes that white space collapses, for example, when a video ad or even text goes into the space – have seen this behavior on other sites over the years
no white space showing up in last couple of days after ad disabled. (time frame indeterminate, ad disable indication on front page was a clear change in behavior.)
older MacBook running nearly up-to-date OS (11.something) on safari.
alquitti
I would suggest the comment system at LGM, where commenters have a dialogue with each other as well as with the original post, is better, and leads to longer threads. Also placing the “Leave a comment” box at the top rather than the bottom might help.
SiubhanDuinne
No problems today ???
Edward Brennan
@different-church-lady:
also have teal issues. Noticed Twitter aspect too.
WaterGirl
@Edward Brennan: I assume you are on a mobile device of some kind? Can you tell me what device, what browser? thanks
emrys
I am using Safari on my iPad. The “cannot load” is pretty much gone.
Loading seems faster with very few white spaces.
debbie
Now that the automatic refresh thing is history, my mini iPad’s fine. The only other issue is not getting both visual and text tabs. This happens on all my stuff — iPad, Chromebook, Macbook Pro. Frankly, it’s not a big deal. I end up editing most of my posts anyway. ?
WaterGirl
I’m still checking back on this thread, and I will continue to for the next couple of days.
Scout211
I just had four auto-refreshes in a row and one of them triggered the “can’t open this page” screen. The first time the auto-refresh has happened since this thread went up.
iPad Pro iPad OS 14.8, Chrome.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Darn it!
Is anyone else getting the automatic page refresh again?
John Harrold
@different-church-lady:
Are the ads necessary? How much would you need to raise annually to get rid of them entirely
This is so much faster both on my phone and through Safari.
Kristine
@WaterGirl:
Just checked now. I still see white space on my iPhone. It fills in eventually, but the takes a bit of time to load. I hope that helps.
Evil_Paul
It’s actually working properly on my phone now! It’s not reloading every 30 sec!
HeartlandLiberal
Using FireFox on Win 10, Twitter embeds still take about 9 – 10 seconds to appear with images.
Posting this comment, the Visual tab was not available, I had to click the Text tab to post.
As for the Twitter embeds, it has been this way as long as I can remember, so I do not have any idea is it is related or not to the video ad you say you removed.
This on laptop connect to wifi at 144Mbps. Because it is a ten year old Dell I used for post retirement consulting, and the builtin wifi cannot connect to faster channels on the wifi router. But it streams movies and shows at hidef, so good enough for that.
I should try on my workstations downstairs, that get data at 1GB speed, because they are wired.