Access Issues, Post here with as much detail as possible Options

[Imhotep]

Hi all,

Pami (Lady Poet) had started a thread as a welcome back to MM last week in the newbie forum. The discussions have veered off the welcoming her back to her having access issues. Others have joined in so I want to start a separate thread here to continue the discussions.

I'm merging some of those replies into this thread and ask that you post here should you have any issues, concerns or questions about the site.

In order to diagnose the issue, we need SPECIFIC details from you, i.e. what you are clicking on, where you are in the forum and what is happening. This is crucial in helping to determine what may be happening.

Thank you!
~Cleo and Imhotep

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This is the first 'moved post from Pami's thread:

Interesting. I've rebooted the server just to make sure anything that might not have been showing up in task manager was cleared out. It also applied another couple of minor updates while it was at it, so we'll see.

I've also been poking around some of the website speed testing sites and you can see a fairly typical load time report at http://forums.mosaicmusings.net/~pclark/testhttp.htm (ignore the pop up or active content prompt, something with how Word saves web pages I think). To me those numbers seem pretty normal for the graphic nature of the site (and pretty average to other Invision forums I pointed that site at for comparison) but I'll keep digging. Abnormally slow page loads (more than 10-15 seconds) are annoying to all and will be rectified..

Next time slow page loads happen, it would be nice to know if those having problems with the forum URL have any issues with http://www.mosaicmusings.net at the same time. Feel free to use the contact link over there to report issues with the forums, we like to know when these things happen. Since we're on the same physical network as the server, we don't run into any of these issues locally and so unless the site is completely offline it's difficult for us to know if there are issues.

Thanks.
I

[Cleo_Serapis]

Just to be clear, we're not asking for any permanent changes to anyone's settings. Until we understand exactly why some set of people running Internet Explorer are having strange load problems and other people aren't, the only option we have here is to compare settings and see which ones on the slow loading computers are possibly affecting them. Once it's known and understood which specific setting(s) is(are) affecting the speed at which our pages are being loaded, an intelligent discussion on the merits of that setting being on or off can be had.

Installing Firefox ( www.firefox.com ) and attempting to load the forum with that browser changes no settings from Internet Explorer in any form. It's a completely separate program which can be immediately uninstalled once a test of page load speed has been made, presuming one desires to uninstall it. It's a program with identical functionality to IE, and they can happily live side-by-side on the same system without bothering each other. Just don't click any "make Firefox my default web browser" buttons, but even that can be quickly fixed in Internet Explorer's tools->internet options->programs tab ("make IE my default browser") if inadvertantly changed.

Another quick one-time test would be to go to start->program files->accessories->system tools->internet explorer(no addons) and see if the pages load quickly there. That doesn't change any settings either, it just disables any addons (Java, etc) for that Internet Explorer window. Close the window, or even open IE using the normal icons, and it runs with all the addons enabled.