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

Hi again, Jim.

For the last five or six days I've been suffering from auto-refreshing forums (Painful!) - before I can read a thread to the bottom, the page flashes white and I'm back at the top again.

I'm currently running IE5.5 under NT4 Workstation, through a BlackICE Defender firewall. I tried various experiments, as follows:

1) I disabled the firewall. No change.
2) I disabled my (recently purchased) scroll mouse's added features. No Change.
3) I used Netscape 4.7 - this stopped the refreshing problem, but the fonts were too small to read the forums properly (I'm visually impaired), and couldn't be expanded to sufficient size.

So, the auto-refresh is localised to IE, but the copy of IE has been running without this behaviour for about a month before the problem started. It only manifests in user forums - not home pages or articles.

Any ideas?
Peet

Which version of IE are you running?

I'm running v5.5 (public beta) - but I had been running that version for about three weeks before this problem appeared.

The length of the forum may have some bearing on the frewuency of refreshing too...? On some particularly long forums, they refresh before I can scroll all the way to the bottom. This could, of course, be an illusion caused by the fact they take longer to load anyway. I have yet to stand over one with a stopwatch!

I'll be installing Opera 1.3 in the next day or two, so that should solve the problem in the short term.

Peet

The top frame of forums *have* started refreshing if you leave the page long enough, but that definitely *shouldn't* refresh the whole frameset. It could easily be a (rather nasty) bug in IE 5.5.

Out of curiosity, *why* have the top frames started refreshing? And by "top" do you mean the frame physically highest on screen, or are you referring to its position within the logical frame structure?

(Just curious! - I was going to try to write a page of my own to replicate the phenomenon... I've seen it happen on one other site, so it's not limited to you, and definitely seems to be connected to the presence of frames.)

It's not limited to long forums - this one refreshes once every 90 seconds, too! (I timed it over 4 refreshes without touching the keyboard)

There is a different ad. each refresh, which obviously throws suspicion on the ad refresh code... Or perhaps the ads are just chosen at random on page load, hence ad change being caused by the refresh rather than the other way round...?

If you can replicate this on one of your machines, it might be time to hassle Microsoft...?

f.y.i., it doesn't manifest itself in Opera 3.61 or Mozilla milestone 14. As I've already eliminated Netscape too, that lays the blame squarely on IE... Next, I'll try reverting to my old 5.0 installation, though it'll be a shame to lose the "print preview" feature

It definitely doesn't happen in IE5.0 because that's what I run.

The ads are random - or rather they are served by doubleclick according to their own (no doubt arcane) rules.

The ad cycling is definitely only supposed to happen in the frame right at the top, and the fact it works properly on most browsers does tend to point to IE5.5 as the offender.

I'll look into it more next week.