This is a strange one. Every time i visit this site on my work computer, it turns off my monitor. It only ever happens on here lol.
Woah what. Hahah. I do not know how that could happen. Not the computer, but the monitor? All browsers? Just one?
Haha sounds like a bad cable, display driver, or power supply issue. Maybe something about the rendering of the site is overloading it while it's on its last leg, or just the weirdest ever coincidence
Site on mobile is acting weird for me. It won't let me click anything on the sidebar like options, notifications, etc.
What OS and browser? Clear cache and cookies, make sure no content blockers are on. Everything looks fine on my end.
Samsung android 16, One UI 8.0, on Chrome. It looks like it's Cloudflare issues that's happening across the internet, not exclusive to this site.
Apparently like 19% of sites use Cloudflare so even NJ Tranists App was down and parts of X and Door Dash, etc
I constantly get the new cookie banner (Safari, iOS). Also, thew new ads are always at the same place (on top of the URL bar), at the bottom, and it’s a very “bad” location in terms of user experience, compared to the previous ones. Also, I can sometimes have multiple ads at once, the one that sticks to the URL bar and one that appears randomly on the page itself.
Is this still happening after Cloudflare went back up? Repeating: What does "can't click on anything" mean? Is it just the sidebar menu when open?
That's expected during the learning phase: full post here. The adhesion "sticky" ad is being tested versus the other spots to see how they perform, which is why they change and move around. (The top banner spot before was basically literally worthless - like less than a penny per impression; it's why it barely populates now.) I am not sure what the cookie banner is. My guess is you're not in the US? I think other countries have specific cookie disclosure requirements that are regulated and must be shown / agreed to / etc.
Yes it happens to me now too, post Cloudfare problems. I click on something on the menu and nothing happens. Usually have to reload. Okay, thanks! I’m in the EU, but usually we accept it once and then not for a while, today it popped up a lot, every time I went to a different page (without leaving the site).
Hm, can you send me a screenshot the next time that happens? I can't reproduce this in anyway. Does the menu open and then nothing in it is clickable? Or does the menu not open at all? I asked about this with the ad team. My understanding should be accepting it means it's accepted, unless that cookie isn't being saved somehow. iOS 26? Safari? Not in private browsing mode?
I could screenshot but it would just look like it normally looks. So yes the menu opens and looks normal but it isn’t clickable. Reloading then fixes it.
Hm, ok. So if it can be opened that means that tap is working right but the next taps aren't. If you click back to the page (so tap the main screen again) does that work to close the menu? What about retapping the menu button to close it? If it lets you close the menu do other things on the screen work (links, top right button, etc.)? Does long press a menu item work? (Open in a new tab appear?) Made a random guess at an idea that may fix it, will need to propagate ~10 minutes or so.
If you’re still testing the banners on the bottom of the screen, they are absolutely awful for the user experience.
Those both have close buttons on them right? I don’t have my glasses on right now but they should both have close X’s next to them I think.
to follow up and try and explain in more detail: So I get where you’re coming from … the “adhesion” banner isn’t anyone’s favorite, including mine. Ads in general are never a “good” user experience, and I totally understand why it feels worse. I only have a weeks worth of data but the first week so far is that has a 5-7x increase in ad revenue and “bids” compared to the old spot. Like went from “ad revenue tanked to a point of almost pointless” to this may actually change the entire calculus for the sustainability of the website long term. That said, I want to be completely transparent about the situation: Running this site full-time has real ongoing costs (servers, bandwidth, software, my time, etc.) With the old ad setup, the ads were basically running on trash remnant — I was making around $200 a month, which really doesn’t even scratch the surface of supporting the work I put into this place and barely covers the server cost for just the forum per month (~180). And what got me evaluating this again is that I am going to need to upgrade this server again soon to handle attachments. The 11 years of photo uploads is now taking up a lot of space and I need to probably offload those to a second server and setup a way to keep them and be able to grow that storage as photos get bigger and more get attached to posts. That alone is maybe 50 bucks more per month (to start and increasing with space) depending on how I end up doing it. Also going to be a not insignificant amount of code to write to handle it, since it’ll have to be all custom built. The choice really came down to two options: 1) Paywall almost everything, or 2) Use an ad platform that actually pays enough to keep the site sustainable. I obviously didn’t want to lock the site behind a paywall. That feels terrible, and very against what this community has always been. And I’d have to do the math to find out what actually makes that worth doing, and we would lose a lot of people I want to be able to access the website and participate. I just don’t like the option, even if it’s where a lot of places are going. So I went with option #2. And when you work with a real ad network, they test placements, formats, and viewability so advertisers actually buy the inventory. Early on, some placements can feel a bit rough — but the trade-off is that it lets the site stay free for everyone, and over time the ads themselves improve as campaigns stabilize. That’s also why I made the ad-free option as cheap as possible: $25/year or $3/month. Honestly, I think that’s more reasonable than any other site I know that offers a similar option. (Stereogum is 66 bucks a year and 121 to remove ads, I remove ads at the base level.) I know ads suck. I know it’s not ideal. But the only real alternative would be to make the site supporters-only, and I don’t want to do that to the community. This setup is what lets the site stay open, free, and running … while still giving anyone who wants it the option to remove ads entirely. Thanks for understanding .. and seriously, I hear the feedback and appreciate it. I wish I had better options but this is where I’m at right now and am trying to start to get some data here to make better options. Also, the other catalyst is the ad company we were working with was 1) clearly selling crap ads, the ICE ad put me over the edge, 2) not paying me on time. Multiple months they went dark and didn’t reply to me and didn’t pay me for weeks after the due date. Which obviously also made me mad and put me in a precarious position.
Sorry for the late response. Whatever it was, it works now. The out of control cookie banner has stopped too.