Author Topic: New NSF Feedback Thread  (Read 375338 times)

Offline Chris Bergin

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #560 on: 09/13/2015 10:43 pm »
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Offline mtakala24

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #561 on: 09/16/2015 09:33 pm »
Not too many videoes being posted in there, much of the public awesome stuff has been buried in launch/mission threads via youtube or other links. And sadly quite a few have since been removed from youtube.

Makes me think of a way/need/criteria to archive stuff *from* youtube...

Offline Rocket Science

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #562 on: 09/17/2015 04:06 pm »
For the last few days the "recent forum posts" buttons on the "home page" have not been working for me. Running Windows 10 and I tried Firefox, Chrome and IE with no luck...
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Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #563 on: 09/30/2015 02:52 pm »
Okay, this is a weird one, and I'm not absolutely convinced it's not a Chrome error.  But lately, when I have been moving from a thread index to a post, I have been receiving an intermittent occurrence of the following Chrome message pop-up:

The page at https://live-ssl.cdn.spongecell.com says:

something else other than 200 was returned

This pop-up only has an OK button.  Once you click OK, the requested navigation completes and you go to the correct page for the post you selected.

I have a suspicion that the live-ssl.cdn.spongecell URL noted has something to do with the sideboard adverts on the site.  If I had to guess, Chrome is seeing a response from one of these ads that isn't correct based on the cookie or on the html coding of either the main page or the ad frame.

However, I always have some concerns when my browser pops up such error messages.  My main worry is that one of the ad providers may have been compromised and the browser is seeing something that could indicate malware attempting to load itself along with an ad.

So, I figured since I was seeing a URL related to the issue, I would post it just in case Mark could look at it and say, "Well, spongecell, that's XYZ advertisers!  Let me shoot them off an e-mail and ask them if they've been having issues with their ad servers" or something like that... :)

For the record, I am running Windows 10 Home edition (64-bit), with all Windows updates to-date, and Chrome version 45.0.2454.101 m.
« Last Edit: 09/30/2015 02:53 pm by the_other_Doug »
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Chris Bergin

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #564 on: 09/30/2015 04:43 pm »
We have a google ad at the bottom of the page, but we have no pop ups on the site. Google ads are different for everyone (usually based on location and such). Thanks for the info as Mark can block any google ad, so I assume that's all he needs to do with that spongecell.
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Offline russianhalo117

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #565 on: 09/30/2015 04:47 pm »
Okay, this is a weird one, and I'm not absolutely convinced it's not a Chrome error.  But lately, when I have been moving from a thread index to a post, I have been receiving an intermittent occurrence of the following Chrome message pop-up:

The page at https://live-ssl.cdn.spongecell.com says:

something else other than 200 was returned

This pop-up only has an OK button.  Once you click OK, the requested navigation completes and you go to the correct page for the post you selected.

I have a suspicion that the live-ssl.cdn.spongecell URL noted has something to do with the sideboard adverts on the site.  If I had to guess, Chrome is seeing a response from one of these ads that isn't correct based on the cookie or on the html coding of either the main page or the ad frame.

However, I always have some concerns when my browser pops up such error messages.  My main worry is that one of the ad providers may have been compromised and the browser is seeing something that could indicate malware attempting to load itself along with an ad.

So, I figured since I was seeing a URL related to the issue, I would post it just in case Mark could look at it and say, "Well, spongecell, that's XYZ advertisers!  Let me shoot them off an e-mail and ask them if they've been having issues with their ad servers" or something like that... :)

For the record, I am running Windows 10 Home edition (64-bit), with all Windows updates to-date, and Chrome version 45.0.2454.101 m.
Somewhat related: Due to decline Google's ad revenue from too many people using Ad Block, the next versions of Chrome will rollout unblockable/unskippable ads for those with ad block software installed.
« Last Edit: 09/30/2015 05:06 pm by russianhalo117 »

Offline Chris Bergin

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #566 on: 09/30/2015 05:03 pm »
It should be down to the site to balance ads versus content. I've been on a lot of sites where it's literally impossible.....pop up ads, video ads (noisy ones, that autoplay), video ads in the middle of articles, totally unrelated. Surveys (pointless ones) before you can read the text. Heck even borders that are ads that "follow you" as you scroll.

And there's a massive trend to embed those fake stories that are ads, you know the "Other things that will interest you" fake articles like "You wouldn't believe what she said next" and "10 top cheerleaders" which are ads FULL of ads and all manner of crap.

It's getting really silly. We'll never allow that here - and I get at least 10 e-mails a day from these companies that want to embed all manner of crap into this site (for a lot of money too - especially for a heavy hit site like this one). And they all use the tactic of sending the e-mail five times, with a "in case you missed this" and then "can you please respond!" Amazing!  :o

Wankers, the lot of them! ;D

I think we're pretty good here. We have the right hand side and it's all space stuff. We have the bottom google placement, but that's really it and it's not in your face.

L2 pays the bills.
« Last Edit: 09/30/2015 05:05 pm by Chris Bergin »
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Offline savuporo

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #567 on: 09/30/2015 05:33 pm »
And there's a massive trend to embed those fake stories that are ads, you know the "Other things that will interest you" fake articles like "You wouldn't believe what she said next" and "10 top cheerleaders" which are ads FULL of ads and all manner of crap.
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Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #568 on: 09/30/2015 05:42 pm »
After I posted this I got curious and did a look-up on the spongecell domain listed above.  There are a number of sibling domains, but they are all registered through go-daddy.  There is a website that gives stats for all kinds of domains, and it says that the specific domain I'm seeing doesn't have reported malware activity, but that some of the sibling domains do.

Also, when I copy the URL for the Google ad at the bottom of the page, I get a domain named https://secure-ds.serving-sys.com.  Not the spongecell domain.  It's looking like something in one of the cookies from one of the ads (or maybe even in the main NSF cookie) is doing some kind of redirect or call to this spongecell domain, and expects a response of 200.  It doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong, this might just be an internet domain tool that verifies I'm logged into the site, or something.  It's just an odd error.

There certainly aren't any pop-up ads happening on the site -- this pop-up that I am seeing is an error message pop-up from Chrome itself.  I've never thought the ad content here to be obtrusive or interfering.

So -- still something of a mystery.  And again, I put it out here to see if anyone else is seeing this, and/or if it might be useful info to our Webmaster.  I still don't discount the possibility that it is some kind of an issue with my particular Chrome installation, or even how Chrome and my Norton Security Suite are interacting.  And on top of all that, Windows 10 is still not as stable as Windows 7 was at the time I made the transition, I find.  So, it could be a number of factors causing this.

It's not stopping me from navigating the site, I just have to click through an occasional, intermittent occurrence of a non-transparent error message.  I'm only feeling the discomfort inherent in clicking through an error message that doesn't tell me what is wrong, why, or even what operation is encountering the error.

:)
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #569 on: 09/30/2015 05:55 pm »
And, getting ever closer (Google is your friend), I looked up CDN (which appears in the spongecell URL), thinking it sounded like some kind of networking system.  I found this in good ol' Wikipedia:

Quote
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their audience of end-users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers. Besides better performance and availability, CDNs also offload the traffic served directly from the content provider's origin infrastructure, resulting in possible cost savings for the content provider. In addition, CDNs provide the content provider a degree of protection from DoS attacks by using their large distributed server infrastructure to absorb the attack traffic. While most early CDNs served content using dedicated servers owned and operated by the CDN, there is a recent trend to use a hybrid model that uses P2P technology. In the hybrid model, content is served using both dedicated servers and other peer-user-owned computers as applicable.

So, looks like its some kind of invalid response from a CDN server that is actually providing some or all of the content of a given page at the time I choose to navigate.  Might be something Mark may want to pass along to our hosting ISP.
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Star One

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #570 on: 09/30/2015 06:52 pm »

It should be down to the site to balance ads versus content. I've been on a lot of sites where it's literally impossible.....pop up ads, video ads (noisy ones, that autoplay), video ads in the middle of articles, totally unrelated. Surveys (pointless ones) before you can read the text. Heck even borders that are ads that "follow you" as you scroll.

And there's a massive trend to embed those fake stories that are ads, you know the "Other things that will interest you" fake articles like "You wouldn't believe what she said next" and "10 top cheerleaders" which are ads FULL of ads and all manner of crap.

It's getting really silly. We'll never allow that here - and I get at least 10 e-mails a day from these companies that want to embed all manner of crap into this site (for a lot of money too - especially for a heavy hit site like this one). And they all use the tactic of sending the e-mail five times, with a "in case you missed this" and then "can you please respond!" Amazing!  :o

Wankers, the lot of them! ;D

I think we're pretty good here. We have the right hand side and it's all space stuff. We have the bottom google placement, but that's really it and it's not in your face.

L2 pays the bills.

I even get those embedded ads that look stories on Tapatalk with certain forums, obviously this forum isn't one of the offenders.:D

Offline Todd Martin

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #571 on: 09/30/2015 06:57 pm »
My biggest wish-list item for NSF would be a longer "Recent Forum Posts" header on the front page.  If 10 most recent posts were listed, I wouldn't miss as much I think.

Offline mheney

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #572 on: 10/03/2015 05:09 pm »
I'm seeing a difference in behavior on "unread posts" between Firefox and Chrome.  I've attached a screenshot to show what's happening.  In Crhrome (to the left), I'm seeing exactly 2 unread posts.  Meanwhile, Firefox is showing that I have 4 pages of unread posts - which is correct.

My access this morning went like this:  From Firefox, I looked at my e-mail, notices a number of "reported posts" clicked on the links, and also opened a new tab to look a the "Live: Reports to Moderators" article to see if anything needed action.  When I was done, I (still in Firefox) navigated to NSF's "Unread Topics" forum tab, and got the expected four pages (dating back to yesterday morning, when I last visited) of unread topics.

I then opened Google Chrome, navigated to the same "Unread topics" tab - and showed only two articles available, dating back to the time I last read ANY article (over in Firefox) - i.e, the last 5 minutes or so.

FWIW, I'm on a desktop running Windows 10 at home.  My previous session (yesterday morning) had been from Firefox on a Linux (Gentoo) system at work ...

As a software guy, this just strikes me as odd ...


Offline cosmicvoid

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #573 on: 10/18/2015 05:08 am »
Today I was reading this thread:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38636.0
and after a page or two I noticed I wasn't offered "Quote" or "Like" buttons. I reopened the first page of the thread, and "Like" and "Quote" were present. Strange.
Infiinity or bust.

Offline Chris Bergin

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #574 on: 10/18/2015 01:36 pm »
Today I was reading this thread:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38636.0
and after a page or two I noticed I wasn't offered "Quote" or "Like" buttons. I reopened the first page of the thread, and "Like" and "Quote" were present. Strange.


Did you log out (as in your login time expired) during reading? Guests can't like or quote, which would explain it.
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Offline cosmicvoid

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #575 on: 10/19/2015 07:45 am »
Did you log out (as in your login time expired) during reading?

I virtually never log out. Can't remember when I last logged in.

Is there an inactivity timout? I commonly take breaks while reading threads, and come back in an hour or two. But I don't pay attention to the Like/Quote except for the rare times I wan't to use them.


Infiinity or bust.

Offline Mark McCombs

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #576 on: 10/28/2015 08:58 pm »
Request:

Is it possible to format board so when one clicks the "mark read" button, the user is returned to the section header one level up?

Thank you.
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Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #577 on: 11/07/2015 03:07 am »
Hmmm... about 15 minutes ago, I started seeing slow response in forum navigation.  Then I got an error that SFM, I think it said it was, could not connect to the database.  Then the site wouldn't load at all for about a minute, and now it's loading but I'm still getting intermittently slow navigation, on the order of five to fifteen seconds of waiting for a navigation link to actually connect to the requested page.

At the same time, other websites were loading fine, and even a speed test ran fine, with very fast speeds and little jitter.

FYI...
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Chris Bergin

Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #578 on: 11/07/2015 10:51 am »
Hmmm... about 15 minutes ago, I started seeing slow response in forum navigation.  Then I got an error that SFM, I think it said it was, could not connect to the database.  Then the site wouldn't load at all for about a minute, and now it's loading but I'm still getting intermittently slow navigation, on the order of five to fifteen seconds of waiting for a navigation link to actually connect to the requested page.

At the same time, other websites were loading fine, and even a speed test ran fine, with very fast speeds and little jitter.

FYI...

Looks like the site had a three minute-long hissy fit at about 3am GMT, but then sorted itself out. Not sure why it wouldn't be immediately back to normal for you after the hissy fit.

We do need to start the next revamp of everything soon, so all you programmers and web wizards please be on standby to chip in when we crowdsource a team from this site's membership.
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Offline HVM

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Re: New NSF Feedback Thread
« Reply #579 on: 11/19/2015 11:14 pm »
Is the RSS feed down? (My FF's RSS bookmark doesn't load)

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