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Also experiencing the longest thread load times in a while this morning (using Chrome on both PC and phone).
This thread is taking 4-5 seconds to load.
But then about a minute to post.
We are currently being hit by a huge number of non-human requests. They are targetting our shop and search pages as these are currently not cached. We know what the problem is. Now we are just putting in a fix. Sorry about the slowness.
Things are speeding up. We had Bingbot hammering our site search with random and mostly japanese words. We've added specific protections in our Cloudflare config to fix that. Among other things.
We continue to make changes. After being distracted by wierd robots speaking in japanese overnight we are back on to optimistaion work. Anthony is working on the posting delay issue. Working with various cache controls and other complicated things.
I'm working on the Ad Block detection. I have an idea, based on feedback from here and specifically @cougar (cheers).
The next bit is for the techies..
The CMP script does two things. It generates the GDPR popup to get consent AND it detects Ad Block tech. I think I've managed to separate the two functions into separate code snippets. This means I can now control them independently. The CMP must fire on the very first page you hit (Detects if you have already given consent and moves on by standard cookie detection - consent cookies should last 12 months). But I should be able to set up the Ad Block Detection script to only fire after X number of page impressions. If I can do that then subscribers can login BEFORE the script fires, which will bypass the whole Ad block detection. That should mean that you won't even need to whiteliest the site. Your existing Ad block setup should be able to be left untouched.
It will all depend on you being logged in before the script fires. If you click on a few pages before you login you could trigger it. Since ads will show for free members this won't help there. Free members would still need to whitelist the site to avoid the adblock detection.
It's not in place yet but I'll update here when it is.
It’s been incredibly slow to access STW on my iPhone the last week.
Just took roughly 1 minute of staring at a blank screen before anything appeared
Bots are back.
And you've clicked that wrong checkbox on ad- free Mark, unable to access the site on any browser on my PC. The one time passcode not letting me in, or my password
After being distracted by wierd robots speaking in japanese overnight we are back on to optimistaion work. Anthony is working on the posting delay issue.
I said this before but I don't know if it got lost. It looks to me like when you click a link it fetches the entire thread and then hops to the first / last / last read / whichever page. This would explain why large threads take longer, and why it flashes up the first page before (usually) showing the correct one.
I'm not a DBA but this feels like an SQL query misstep - surely you should only be SELECTing the data you want to display rather than pulling the whole thread and then filtering out the 95% you don't need. That first page shouldn't be in the returned results to show in the first place.
I could be talking out the top of my head here, but that's how it appears.
Remember the forum software is not our code. It's Wpforo.com
We could fork the plugin and start changing how it works but then that opens a whole new can of worms.
And you've clicked that wrong checkbox on ad- free Mark, unable to access the site on any browser on my PC. The one time passcode not letting me in, or my password
Our login does not require a passcode. I think you are trying to login to the AdFree subscription. That's not a Singletrack subscription.
If you want to email me direct with info on what browser you are using and device I can help you out
For subscribers. do NOT click the 'Already an Ad-Free subscriber? Login' link. You are not an Ad Free subscriber. I know it's confusing but getting Uniconsent to make meaningful changes to this popup is a job of work akin to sending short messages by pigeon. Singletrack subscribers you have two options here. And if our site cookies are allowed to be stored on your device it's something you should only need to do once/year.
1) Click on the Accept and Continue button and then login as normal.
2) Click the link in green (It's not green in the real world, I've just highlighted it). This will take you direct to the login page.
Just to be contrary I came here to say that I have finally been allowed to click on the ad free button with shields up in Brave and also in Edge.
I then clicked on the ad free subscriber log in in Edge. I logged in with a passcode and it allowed me to subscribe to ad free for £15.
I am now logged in to my account and I do not see any ads
Singletrack subscribers you have two options here. And if our site cookies are allowed to be stored on your device it's something you should only need to do once/year.
1) Click on the Accept and Continue button and then login as normal.
2) Click the link in green (It's not green in the real world, I've just highlighted it). This will take you direct to the login page.
Thanks Mark, it would be great if the link in green was in real life a BIG link in green so it was obvious. But you look at that pop-up and see two big blue buttons to click and it;s easy to miss the link buried in the text.
And i reckon JPt853 should be giving singletrack money not AdFree, but the whole experience is very not user friendly
Apologies if grumpy, I was getting flummoxed by a Gridserve fast charger UI on the M1 at midnight last night with another 2 hours of driving, and their UI was equally opaque
Remember the forum software is not our code. It's Wpforo.com
We could fork the plugin and start changing how it works but then that opens a whole new can of worms.
Ah yes. So you upgrade to the next version and if you haven't been very careful it reverts all your custom code.
Now, where did I put that particular tee-shirt...
On AdFree,
Am I right in thinking that sub will then also apply to every other site which uses AdFree? (Not that I know of any, but...)
How much of that money do you see? I'm assuming/hoping it's more lucrative than adverts even if you only get Spotify royalties levels of kickback from it.
We get ‘most’ of it. I’ll know more in a month from now. I honestly don’t know if it counts for other websites. I wasn’t expecting it to. I’ve priced it for our site.
There's a new version of Wpforo in beta at the moment. It looks like it will bring some nice stuff to the table when it's released properly. We are about to start testing it on our dev site.
For interested techies... This is what we are doing battle with right now. A report from our logs for the last 30 minutes..
52.167.144.160 — very high volume, firing every 10–20 seconds with garbage queries in Arabic, Chinese, Khmer, Vietnamese, English and more. This is a new IP from earlier (was .173 and .215 before). Classic rotating IP evasion — same /16 subnet, new host.
52.167.144.215 — also active, firing bike-adjacent queries like schwalbe marathon plus, santa cruz wheels, headset cable replacement mixed with obvious garbage. Interestingly some of these look almost plausible for your site — worth noting, though the rate and pattern still marks this as bot behaviour.
157.55.39.62 and 157.55.39.14 — both active simultaneously, firing every 2–5 seconds at points, with queries like bontrager xl bike helmets, BCA BIKES CROSSFIRE, lime bike 20 min ride, and then complete gibberish. This is the 157.55.39.x range that was active this morning.
52.160.0.0 is a /11 subnet owned by Microsoft (I think, it's been a while) so presumably 52.167.144.16 is inside an Azure tenant somewhere? The 157 addresses are similar.
MSFT has an abuse@ address, though how effective that is I don't know. You'd probably be playing whack-a-mole.
It's Bing search engine doing the crawling. It is wakamole at the mmoment until we can sort out a solution.
Kinsta have Cloudflare up front as part of the package but it's a single instance that protects the entire Kinsta client base. So they can't set up individual blocks in their filters. They can only set allow rules. This is because any disallow filters they set up for us may bugger up some other clients website. A potential soloution is that we setup our own Cloudflare account and configure that to run on our dedicated server. Then we can set up all the specific allow and block rules we need.
The whole ad block detection has been a bit of a shit show. On iPhone the go ad free red button didn’t do anything for quite a while so I was locked out. The flow is now different, but it was still a fiddle to get to a point where I could login as a magazine subscriber. I eventually found a why are we doing this link which got me to a point where I could access the regular site menu to login. Hopefully the magazine is still going to turn up in an easy to open package 😉
I was wondering what was going on. Why the hell would anyone want to take STW offline?
Freeads gives some strange blockouts where an ad should be so you cannot see some of the topics or text in topics. It is just random.
Brave and Edge for me.
Hopefully picture load works as I have not had to use postimages since the redesign
I would also say Freeads is opaque
The below plus an invoice attached to an email is all you get
No details about how autorenewal works etc, no links to anything. Manage email preferences is a dead link for me
Let me know how it works. Ther is a certain amount of me ensuring the code that is required is present on every page you visit.
No problem, I am not moaning as such just giving some observations which may be useful
Might have been mentioned before, but uploaded picture quality seems terrible for me - like worse than Facebook levels of compression. Is it the same for everyone else and is it something we are going to have to live with?
A quick test.
It is compressed but not too badly. The food was excellent.
A quick test.
The problem of the wrong image coming up in the lightbox when you click on it seems to be back with that. I click the picture of a burger and chips and a screenshot of the cookie banner comes up in the enlarged view.
It is compressed but not too badly
It doesn't look quite as bad as some of the pics I upload tbh - maybe it's a me thing
But also, yeah, as toby says 🙄
I prefer chunky chips
The problem of the wrong image coming up in the lightbox when you click on it seems to be back with that. I click the picture of a burger and chips and a screenshot of the cookie banner comes up in the enlarged view.
Yeah I noticed that.
I prefer chunky chips
Fried for burgers.
Have we lost the ability to find our posts in our account or am I just being dumb? Was hoping to update a couple of threads I started 😕
Is there a way to pay to go ad free (i.e. just the forum) paying STW directly rather than uniconsent?
Is there a way to pay to go ad free (i.e. just the forum) paying STW directly rather than uniconsent?
join as a paid member?