UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Version 7 Support Forum freezing

I have just upgraded to threads from classic 6.3 and one thing many of my visitors are reporting are that the forums "freeze" from time to time.

I don't experience this and it is not uniform but here are some of the comments I have had.

"Unfortunatly your forums are freezing up on me I cant download a Avatar and occasionally when i hit the submit button nothing happens"

"no more than 2 windows but it does freeze up, so i kill the program and start again. When i press submit nothing happens
when i press submit again it comes up as submit disabled very strange???"

or

"some times when i post a reply it freezes,i close the browzer,ie 7,re open on the home page and click forums to start again and it works"

or

"I've had the whole lot lock up three times tonight.

Bombed out of the session totally & started again with no probs.

Twice trying to post & once just swapping between threads..."

or

"That happens to me all the time. I close all the windows which have frozen and then it works fine again when I open up a new window. "

or

"Yup same problems as described above. IE7, Vista. "


Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks.

Do you have the Shoutbox enabled? if so, disable it. There are several instances with IE's wonky handling of ajax that cause some things in IR7 to not work right.

OK thanks will try that. However you guys have the shout box enabled here, is it a problem here? If not, why not.

I think it varies between servers - I have the shoutbox enabled on www.fansfocus.com and have not heard of any issues.

I also allow for the right hand margin to be disabled if people were to get any issues.

I have experienced the "Freeze" with IE7 on this site.
I either use Fire Fox or in IE 7 view turn off the right side bar including the shout box.

Its an IE 7 thing

Even FireFox has slow down issues when the shout box is on. On my site I can use IE7 or Firefox and the speed is about the same.

For some sites I think the refresh might be more problematic for IE6 and IE7 than for Firefox but it is an issue for all browsers to some degree..

We've heard of problems with the shoutbox on many differant sites, but generally more troublesome on IE7; which is why the "disable right sidebar" and "disable left sidebar" options where added.

I'm also experiencing this freezing due to IE and the Shoutbox.

How about detecting the user's browser and disabling the loading of the shoutbox if it's IE, and displaying a helpful message in it's place?

Before I start digging myself, has anyone already done this, or would know how/where to do it? The send_column function?

I have implemented sirdude's naked shoutbox that he has published on ubbdev - this then takes the shoutbox independant of the forums. This seems to work fine.

I will probably bring it back to the sidebar for 7.3, to see how we go - but will always allow the user to turn off the right hand sidebar - to aid this, I included a 'turn off' link at the top, which takes them straight to the 'my preferences' for them.

Thanks Ian, and it's good to know Sir Dude's naked shoutbox alleviates this problem. But I'm not really looking to reimplement the Shoutbox (yet!?). I'm happy for it to exist in the column so long as the user's browser is.

So I just need a fix to prevent it from loading in a column if a user's browser is IE.

I mean, this is a known issue with the IE browser, isn't it? If so, it'd be nice to put in a work around. A user of mine brought up a good point in that we may be alienating users because the site just freezes up for them because of the Shoutbox + IE combo. For some, changing browser may not be a practical option.

No it is not a known issue with IE, this "freeze" happens with Firefox as well, however IE does seem to make it more noticeable.

In order to do what you ask you would need a special script JS or similar to detect the browser and use different CSS/HTML code.

Could you not instead use php to detect the broswer, then simply not load the shoutbox in the send_column function?

This is how I originally thought it could be done. Like:


But I'm concerned, and wasn't previously aware, of the same problem with Firefox.

Has there been any official word on this problem? Could there be a particular apache or mysql setting that contributes or alleviates the problem?

As there have been many changes for 7.3, I think it is best that we wait to see how 7.3 affects the performance.

Well, until 7.3, I'm going to go with disabling the Shoutbox for IE on my site.

I'm trying to enclose the Shoutbox template (island_shoutbox.tpl) with tags <![if !IE]> ... <![endif]> but it doesn't seem to work. Is there a trick to getting these tags recognised in the template? They appear to be stripped out.

Seeing as how 7.3 beta 2 is running here now, can anyone comment on the Shout Box performance?

Has there been any official word (from Rick?) regarding the performance issue with the Shout Box? I'm asking because I didn't notice any particular mentioning of Shout Box changes (under the hood) in the latest changelog.

As far as I know it has not yet been used on any large sites. I will probably go live when we get beta 3. At this point, I plan to put the shoutbox back on the right column, but giving users the ability to disable it if required.

A lot of code has been re-written for 7.3, so any issues may well have gone.

AFAIK no major changes occoured with the shoutbox in 7.3

Indeed, but other code changes may well have helped any issues.

We were going to change javascript libraries in 7.3, however so much was added and changed we decided to push that back until next at which point hopefully we can address any shoutbox problems.

And a load of new features due to the new libraries! :yey!: (still rooting for scriptacular/prototype over yui)

By giving the option to disable the shout box, do you mean the entire right column, or just the shout box itself? I've been wanting to do the latter, based on browser type, but have not had any luck.

What would be good is to have columns that default to OFF, but giving the user the option to turn it ON. Right now, only the reverse is possible (i.e. default ON, allow to switch OFF). This way, I could let registered users enable the column (containing the Shout Box) if they so desired and it doesn't slow them down, while the rest are none-the-wiser.

Do we have any idea why the "problem" occurs, even if it's a qualitative/general description? If I had a starting point, or two, then I could perhaps look into a fix or work-around.