h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think this was a problem once before. It appears that Ripley 1.3 has re-introduced the bug that causes a full refresh of the top frame (in Alabaster skin this is the logo, ads search box and row of orange buttons) every 2-3 minutes. I am quite certain it didn't do this yesterday and for some time before that. I use Alabaster skin on IE 5.0 for Mac OS.

It's not a bug, from what I remember. It's just a thing that allows for extra page views of the ad banners to create more revenue. At least, that was the official description some months back. I remember Mark mentioning this back in Miami, actually, although I think it was on the way back from the Everglades, so you would have been driving the other car, so...er, okay. Maybe I just imagined it.

It is a shame it's back, though. Irritating, ain't it? Well, anything to keep the site free.

Spartus is right - it's a feature

;^)#

Sure is. It's to increase our ad serves, without which etc. etc...

Mark

My point is still:

a) It didn't do it in the last version

b) It shouldn't need to refresh the entire frame including the buttons because

c) That part is really damned annoying, much more so than the ads themselves.

Fair enough...

a) It didn't do it in the last version

Only because we didn't have time to do it. It was there in the Perl site, and would have been in Ripley 1.0, except I kinda forgot to include it in the spec.

b) It shouldn't need to refresh the entire frame including the buttons because

I don't know about this. How else could it refresh the advert without refreshing the whole frame? I didn't think you could set indivudual graphics to refresh - can you?

c) That part is really damned annoying, much more so than the ads themselves.

It's that or no site. We're on the breadline, Greg, and although I agree with you, we don't have a choice.

Mark

(But I'll ask the tech team if there is any better way to do it...)

Mark

You could use a Javascript image cycling thingy, I have seen them before. But I imagine it would have to depend on the filters used to stop insecure Javascript functions coded by researchers.

Worrying about insecure Researcher script wouldn't matter 'cause the forum frames are on a different template than the pages.

At least, I'm fairly sure about that, otherwise the Researcher pages would refresh the top frame too...

No, actually, I don't know how to do it. And I'm certainly not trying to argue that you shouldn't be able to toggle the ads or that there shouldn't be ads or any of those other silly things some people like to argue. I know full well the necessity of such things to the site. I'm just not prepared to accept that "it has to be that way" when I've seen so many other sites that don't seem to have to have it that way. I'm sure you know how terrible it looks and how annoying it is when the whole frame refreshes? It is certainly in h2g2's best interest to find a way around refreshing the whole frame.

I have no problem with having the refresh, but one problem that it points out is that if you live in the uk, where you don't have any possible form of unmetered access, this annoying "feature" stops your inactivity timeout from timing out unless you have it set stupidly short. This means that if you have a mammoth post to read, and thus would not be downloading anything for many minutes, it would timeout, and save you a fortune. Instead, it keeps you on the line, stops you from saving money on the connection, and thereby limits the amount of creative content that you can add to the forums and the guide.
This means that you now have a choice, keep the banners refreshing stupidly often and lose large amounts of content from the uk, or allow the user to set the time period for the adds, and keep the content from the uk.
This is a particularly stupid thing for forum additions, as the script there doesn't even keep the adds on the screen some of the time, but is can be nearly that bad in forums as well.

Or, as BT have now sorted them selves out, you can now get un-metered ISP in the UK too.

bt sorted itself out, when. I thought that I would look into surftime, and so i looked at the bt website. You can only see it with activex controls wide open (there goes the security). I tried their operator and sales numbers, which tell you that the following supplies can be a surftime isp, and then a recordedmessage reels them off so fast that even a touch typist freind of mine couldn't get them down, and she does 140 wpm. The best bit though is that you can't find their email contact to complain that you can't get on the site without getting on the site.
and they call themselves a communications company?
When bt finally does get it's act together you might be right, but not yet.
PS thank staff for slowing down the add stream, the autodisconnect after two minute of not sending anything now works

You'll all be delighted to know that we've disabled the auto-refresh of the top frame on forum pages. While the servers are responding slowly it only makes things worse, so for the moment it's back to normal.

Thought you'd be pleased.

Mark

Could you possibly disable the refreshing on all pages in the highly rumoured Simple Skin?

Probably worth waiting until it exists.