Page jumping on loading.

[ProfJohnL]

I have noticed that forum pages are again slow to load, and are erratically jumping around, whilst adverts load at the top and in the margins. It's incredibly frustrating to see the point on the screen you want but by the time you position the mouse or aim your finger and clip or two, the page has jumped, and you have activated something else entirely.

This was a problem earlier on with this style of forum, but it was sorted out, by setting fixed space for adverts, rather than sizing on loading. Someone has changed back to size on loading, and it's not use friendly. The techies need to look again.

 

[WoodlandsCamper]

Ours is slowish loading, but doesn't jump around as we have Ad Blocker installed.

 

[ProfJohnL]

Thank you for the comment. I too have schlock installed. Page still resizes, just doesn't show the adverts

 

[WoodlandsCamper]

Our local newspaper now has software to check for ad blocking and requests that it is turned off as they use ads for income to run the site. They don't seem to have reporters anymore as all they post are feeds from the emergency services and traffic and weather services. On the odd occasions they do produce a report it is full of typos and grammatical errors. We did use to buy hard copy but the price increases over consecutive years priced it out of our pocket.

 

[geordiegirl]

I`m getting the pages jumping too,

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello woodland's

Yes I have also seen similar banners on websites, and that is a fair comment by site owners who may rely on such income streams. I would not mind the adverts so much if they didn't cause pages to load slowly or cause them to jup around whilst the page rearranges its self to accommodate them.

Newspapers used to rely heavily on advertisers, but papers would have died long ago if when you opened on up the text kept moving around the page.

Website owners like Haymarket, should know how much space an advert is going to use, and fix that in position and size before the page is transmitted.

 

[LizziePope]

Hi all and thanks for your posts – we're on it.

 

[paws]

I don' know if this will help, but I've just tried this site on half a dozen computers that I have in for repair ( part of the final testing!) and no problems experienced with "jumping" or any particularly long delays in page loading.

All machines were laptop or desktops running Windows operating systems and using various browsers...

I can't speak for tablet and smartphones as they are outside my bailiwick!
Regards to all
and of course
Happy Caravanning
paws

 

[Raywood]

I do get the problem on the PC running windows which always seems to happen when you click on something and then you find it has gone to the wrong page. Does not seem to happen with the tablet though.

 

[nrdonnelly]

Hello all.

An update. The page jump phenomenon is being addressed. As mentioned earlier in the thread, it is to do with the advert at the top of the page. When a double-height one is served into the page, it loads and then expands afterwards. That expansion is the irritating jump.

I have asked that the advert slot at the top of the page never has the double-height ads served. Once that is stopped, things should be improved.

Thanks for your patience!

 

[Dustydog]

I hope one of the Techies is listening to you Nigel.
It still annoyingly jumps

 

[Gafferbill]

What adverts?

They are all banned on my laptop,phone and tablet simply by using a browser with blocking software hmy:

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello all.

An update. The page jump phenomenon is being addressed. As mentioned earlier in the thread, it is to do with the advert at the top of the page. When a double-height one is served into the page, it loads and then expands afterwards. That expansion is the irritating jump.

I have asked that the advert slot at the top of the page never has the double-height ads served. Once that is stopped, things should be improved.

Thanks for your patience!

Hello Nigel,
Simply tell your advertisers the size of advert they can post to a particular area, then just make sure the page is ready to receive the advert without needing to resize. You are selling the space so you must know what size has been allocated to a particular part of the page before its posted.

 

[nrdonnelly]

Thanks for all the comments! It is still jumping, but the offending advert creatives will not be permitted on the forum pages in the next few days.

ProfJohnL - Right idea, but difficult for us to achieve. The site is built to serve whichever ads are sold into the slot. Because they are sold through a display network, which represents thousands of clients, we don't know what ad will be served - but we can limit which sizes we make available. By banning the offending 'expanding creative masthead format' (as it is catchily named!), we can stop the very annoying jump.

The advertising operations people have completed their investigations and we are now in a queue to get the work done to remove the 'orrible ads!

Thanks for your patience!

 

[ProfJohnL]

Thank you Nigel,

PCF is not the worst offender in this respect. AOL is horrendous, taking upwards of 20 to 30 seconds to before the page stops jumping. I often give up waiting pages and go elsewhere, which rather defeats the principle behind advertising.

 

[DrZhivago]

PCF is not the worst offender in this respect. AOL is horrendous

Not by a long long way.

The web is being ruined by the way ads are using it. I am not against unintrusive ads, but the ad world now does real time bidding (by computers of course) for the space that website owners (or more likely the hosting company) have sold to ad agencies. The bidding is much of the delay (watch your status bar ); there are some websites I use that never finish loading their page, no matter how long I have the page on the screen.

The website owner has little or no control over what goes in there. Ads (not all of them of course) are also becoming a vehicle for adware and malware.

As it happens, it is the 25th anniversary of the first ever web page, It is still on-line :-

CERN

Note that it loads instantly - no ads, no baggage, no bloat. I have a hobby website and despite being designed by an amateur (me) it also loads very fast - simply because it has no ads (I won't link, too modest).

In a techies' forum I frequent [warning : some strong language] discussing the CERN website there is a lot of anger about the way the web is going, like :

"I'm sick of css, javascript, bloat, **** designers and their 3MB, 5 seconds to load, +3 seconds to render, +4 social media buttons, plus "responsive" touch based picogram icons ****ing up my web browsing experience"

Sums it up.

 

[nrdonnelly]

Dear all,

The ad format at the top of all forum pages has been locked in place - the jumping of the page has been stopped, but please shout if you see it re-emerge. We have changed the maximum size of adslot, but that doesn't mean we definitely won't get some odd behaviour as it settles down. I will keep popping by to look.

As for website bloat, javascript and all the rest of it - Hard to not agree. If you find the answer let us know!

Thanks for your patience

Nige

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Nigel,

I don't know it's related but I have just tried to access the forum through my tablet on my usual home WiFi, and not only is the site slow to respond, but the page is jumping around as different bits load for up to 10 seconds. Also I have been getting strange results when having left a comment, the thread is still shown as being unread, and the page navigation is jumping across to a different thread. All very frustrating,