An update on recent technical problems and more from the admin: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/250292/on-technical-difficulties-mod-coverage-and-other-things/p1?new=1
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Forums crashing Opera
Walrus Pete
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Every third time or so that I click the forums link from the PA main page, Opera crashes. Easily worked around by bookmarking the forum index, but it's still annoying and I thought it was worth reporting.
Walrus Pete on
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What sort of HTML demonry is this? :P
I'm using opera 9.20, I probably should upgrade. I guess.
Lazy.
I narrowed it down. It's not related to clicking the forums link in anyway. The problem is with one of the horizontal ads you guys are running. The PSP ad with the text "rollover for titles" crashes Opera 100% of the time when the user rolls over the ad and then leaves the ad's space. The false correlation to the forums link is that I would always mouse across the ad and have just enough time to click the forum link before the crash popped up. Also, since the ad only shows up some of the time, it seemd to be a "high chance" that clicking it caused the crash.
But also, I'd say more likely The problem is with Opera or Flash. There is no reason for adverts on Penny-Arcade to be purposely hiding browser crash-bug exploits. My guess is that Opera either already has a bug on file for it, or they have a fix for it. But because it is a closed-source development model I can't say for sure. Just go here and send your report into the ether, or, get a better browser.
Ok.
I think what you really meant to say is:
Because, really, I find it hard to believe that you would take the same stance if this issue was affecting PA readers who were using a minorly out of date version of IE or firefox:
"Well, it really is a shame that most of our users are crashing everytime their mouse goes over one of our advertisers' links, but they should really just use a browser that's compliant with our content. Oh well, they'll figure it out eventually."
Uh, no. There is just no way that would happen, the ad would be pulled immediately. The internet has a long history of web designers going to tremendous lengths in order to mask a wide variety of rendering bugs and standards-deviating glitches that appear in the browsers that their users are likely to be using. It's certainly far less than an optimal situation, but that's how it is. While I would imagine that the percentage of Opera users is much higher at a site like PA than at a typical site, it still must be a pretty small piece of the pie compared to firefox and IE. So I completely understand the response to this issue. However, I would have vastly preferred to have heard a reply along the lines of:
"Thanks for taking the time to identify a crash some of our users were running into. Unfortunately, the population of readers affected by this bug with this specific version of Opera is such that it does not warrant the substantial task of working with the advertiser in question to track down the underlying cause of the crash and to re-issue a replacement ad. However, we will do our best to notify other users in your situation by making a sticky post in our bug report forums instructing them about both the nature of the problem and the tentative workaround of having them simply update their browser to the most recent version to avoid any further issues."
But an admin taking the time to fire off a few (hopefully) light-hearted potshots at my browser of choice, make kind of a silly statement, and then instructing me to switch to firefox works, too.
Ya, I've used firefox before, thanks!
Ramius admins the forum, not the site. And you probably just guaranteed that nothing will be done about it unless a rational person reports the bug. Right now, it's just you.
Edit: Maybe some other people too. None of them are suggesting that we have anti-Opera benefactors, though.
I realize it's hard to understand, but:
means that we actually don't have any control over the front-page ads. If you want to bring it to the attention of someone who can do something about it, you should e-mail Gabe, Tycho, or Khoo. Of course, a very, very small fraction of our users use Opera (I believe the last time Ramius gave us the numbers, it was something like 2.5%), and of those people, apparently only a very small fraction of them are actually encountering this problem, and that fraction seem to be using an outdated version. I would say that puts the problem on your end of things, not PA's end of things.
And really, Ramius was more than polite in addressing your problem, especially since you didn't even bother to read the rules.
Except on Linux. It's mostly due to the way it uses Flash. Any page with Flash content, you take your browser's life into your hands.
So to prevent crashing, just disable Flash for Opera.
It's more like, "Opera is vastly superior to Firefox, except when it isn't working correctly"
which is a lot.
I mean, I like Opera, and it's my browser of choice on OS X (which happens to be my desktop OS of choice), but there's no fucking way I'm going to use it without expecting it to explode at entirely random times. Between being completely unable to cope with syntax, some even standards compliant, to breaking on things like message boxes, to random crashes, it's just not very reliable.
I was going to respond to each of these posts since they seemed to either be misunderstanding me or just trying to prod a more lively reply out of me, but I decided to hold off on that and try another route.
So, I apologize.
All I was intending to do was to help uncover the actual problem for anyone else who was experiencing it. I saw this thread, replied, did some basic investigation and replied again, and then I was a bit irked by the seemingly official response. I'm sorry that my most recent post took on a bit of a smarmy-ass tone there. I agree that this issue just doesn't affect a statistically significant percentage of people to warrant much attention, especially since the fix is to just freaking upgrade to a newer version of Opera. However, with the volume of traffic that PA gets, even 0.1% is probably still alot of people. I just wanted to get the information out, not to get tangled up in a pointless argument.
All bullshittery aside: YOU ARE TALKING TO THE WRONG PEOPLE!
Styled for emphasis, not anger.
Ramius' power is vast, possibly on the edge of limitless, but he can't do much, if anything, about the site. There may be a time in the future where the operation of the forum and site is co-ordinated, but that time is not now. Your post is not likely to be seen by the people responsible for the ads if you post about it here.
I'm talking to the people that are annoyed that their browser is crashing, happen to peek into the bug report subforum to see if there is a known issue, and see this thread.
Just like I did.
Although now I kind of miss it, avoiding the ad was like an internet version of Operation.
On a side note, the first time I saw "Roll over for titles" I read it as "Roll over for titties".
Also, Opera beats FireFox by a mile for low memory machines, but that's neither here nor there.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
I'm glad this has come to a non-confrontational ending, though.
As far as caring about minority browsers, I think you misunderstood me.. I would have said the same to anybody running anything less than FF 2.0.0.11, IE6SP2, or IE7. I wasn't picking on you for choosing Opera, I was telling you that the version you were running probably has bugs and you should upgrade.
To reiterate my own experience, I was previously aware that the forums were largely independent of the site, but I had incorrectly assumed there to be some routine form of communication between the two entities for such matters. Perhaps the rules should be amended with a more direct assertion of this divide, if only to prevent the further perpetuation of this assumption. As it stands now, the wording of these rules leaves the strong impression that they exist only to avoid a deluge of threads along the lines of "Wow! Wasn't today's comic really funny?!", whereas a focused discussion of a technical matter regarding the main site could still be considered appropriate -- unless, of course, that wondering why our browsers were crashing is assumed to be classified under "fun stuff" that some of us "would like to know."
To be more specific, it appears from your reactions that such a topic on these forums is acceptable, and only the belief that the administrators of these forums are in any way responsible or, for that matter, are even able to resolve such issues is not. A brief expansion of the rules clarifying this distinction would have been very helpful, at least in my case. I sincerely hope that my latest assumption is aligned with your official stance since, overall, this thread was actually very useful. As a result of this thread I learned both the exact source of the problem and that there was a solution which I likely would not have bothered to otherwise try so quickly. More importantly, I imagine that other PA readers were helped as well - that is to say, while it may have been a bit outside the original realm of this subforum, threads such as this seem to coincide with the intended goals of this subforum and therefore should be permitted, albeit with the caveats discussed above.
Thanks!