I often browse the BBS not logged in while I’m on my iPad. For the last couple of weeks (my bad, I should’ve reported this sooner) I’ve been unable to swipe the page right while reading a thread to return to the topic list. Let me illustrate.
The topic list is there for a moment then becomes an error message. I have to refresh the page to get the topic list to show up.
If while reading the thread I tap on the BoingBoing BBS logo to return to the topic list the thread continues to display. Tapping refresh in the URL bar the causes the topic list to come up.
Again, this error only comes up while not logged in.
You haven’t punched or otherwise head-butted your device into obsolescence whilst attempting to do anything other than browse topics on the mobile bbs? Impressive.
It’s actually okay on the iPad. On my phone, however, trying to scroll through a thread causes so many skips and jumps as bit of replies load and unload that it’s basically impossible to use.
Still happening, but not on every thread. I’ll check again in the morning in case the fix needs time to propagate.
As for Windows phone threads load okay. When I get towards the end of loaded posts (~15 to 20) in a decent-sized thread (~40 posts or larger) then scrolling further in order to read the latter posts results in erratic jumping up and down. This eventually settles down and I’ll find myself looking at a post that’s near the one I was reading, but not the last post before the jumping nor the post after it. It’s especially bad in the Ten Thousand thread, I assume because of all the images.
I find the image threads render all the gifs jumpy and frequently unintelligible.
It’s a cheap tab, so a graphical memory problem wouldn’t surprise me.
Also, when I scroll in the threads, on the tab, it’s a gamble if it’ll jump around. Somtimes I’ll try to scroll up two or three posts and it’ll just jump to the top and stay there.
I dunno if you rolled out fixes for any of that, but I’ll try those things again tomorrow morning and report.
It depends if the images are hotlinked (from a remote site) versus local. If the image is hotlinked, we have zero clue what the size is until your browser retrieves it from the remote site. We can and do set maximum widths and heights, but say the remote image is 100px×1000px (super wide) or 1000px×100px (super tall). The rendered height is always variable, unless we distort the image aspect ratios…
That’s another reason we try to download remote images to make them local, but this isn’t always possible. Say the remote image (or GIF) is 10 megabytes… we don’t want a copy of that locally, etc.
I can understand why images will make for an unpredictable page length, but even if there aren’t any images the page still jumps around while scrolling (on Windows phone).
After swiping back and reloading for the last fifteen minutes this is what I’ve seen: topics in the meta category fail to error every time I swipe back. Topics in boing fail about 70% of the time, and so far no topic in wrath, dizzy, or games has failed.
