I’m frequently getting this error as a dialog box in Firefox when I try to go to a Boing Boing article:
Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
A few retries usually gets the page to come up.
Er what? Is this a bug in BBS or BB proper?
ah, right. it’s the article page, not the BBS page. sorry. mental lapse there.
@Dan_Tobias if it persists we can holler at Beschizza, I guess is the right person to–er–bug. haven’t seen it again today.
Weird, I have never seen that before today, but I got it too.
Also, why is there an article at the top dated 2011… and the comments have been closed for 3 years?
Having the same issue in Firefox. Clearing the cache allows the page to be loaded, but I have to do it every second or third page. Chrome just says “The webpage is not available” but shift+refresh works there, too.
Yeah, I’ve been getting this for a couple of days now as well. Intermittent, but quite frequent.
after 2 days of not seeing it again, it showed up for me a few minutes ago. looks like I’m not the only one.
@beschizza, are you the correct person to notify about this?
@deanputney is. This is apparently something to do with a bad ad that has proven hard to track down.
And here’s me thinking those fraise-blonde locks signified an Eloi, not a Morlock… 
Dean is working with Jonathan as we speak. It has been a tricky one. Thanks to everyone for reporting details, they do help us track down the bad ads.
I actually had to google fraise-blonde. I’m just surprised the french even have a word for ginger!
Try adding a piece of javascript that activates when the page is correctly loaded and interpreted, and calls up something on the server, with report with the ID of the ad. This will identify the ads that are not causing problems. After a while of data collection the bad ad should show up as having the least number, possibly zero, of associated good page loads.
Dean, Jonathan and Ken have determined its not an ad. They continue to work on it. I’m sorry.
You can also delete the “#more-313495” from the end of a url loaded in a new window and the page will work when refreshed.
This is just a data point, and possibly not a useful one, but I just received the error described in the first post of this topic at:
I’m using Firefox 30.0
in the spirit of this, I will report @deanputney that I noticed a flurry of these errors–by far the most i’ve seen–last night between 9pm and midnight Eastern. so 6-9pm boingboing time on 6/24 . I got sleepy and didn’t report it.
caught maybe two in the past hour, too.
Getting them almost every time I try to open an article, both in Safari on the Mac, and Chrome on my Android tablet.
Have been getting this for a bit now. Several times this evening.
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