Forum keeps opening the page so it keeps "blinking"

[Janet]

Hello,

Ever since last night, our forum has been acting up. I can access it, but the page keeps opening itself for some weird reason, so it keeps "blinking" so to speak. When you wait a while, it will come to a stand still, yet not the entire page will load.

Any idea what I can do? I can't post, and I even can't access the admin page to look at the error log 

Please help me, I'd be so grateful 

[TEOC2]

Link?

*EDIT*
Is this it?
http://www.julieandrewsonline.com/forum/index.php

[Janet]

Yes! Sorry, I thought that I posted it in the description of the question

[Rumbaar]

Visited your site, tried to move around.  Didn't notice any 'blinking' or missing loaded page contents.  FireFox browser.

[JAO]

Can you try using Internet Explorer?  That seems to be where we are having the trouble. At this point I can't even get a blinking page.

Last night I could hit refresh and then back page and get part of the page to load but today nothing.

Thanks for the help.

[TEOC2]

I just tried it in IE7, your right, it kinda jumps as if refreshing very quickly then failed to load.

In Firefox & Opera it works fine.

[JAO]

Any idea where we should start looking for the problem or what our next step should be?

Thanks

[Janet]

It's such an odd problem, the members with other browsers are online but all the others (with Explorer) can't get in.

I'm hoping that you can help us. Thank you in advance for looking for us.

[JAO]

I saw to do this in another thread concerning IE problems .. so thought it might help here with our forum access issue. Thanks again.

hxxp:www.julieandrewsonline.com/phpinfo.php [nonactive]

[Rumbaar]

Yeah not sure on that one...

Can only see the only visible difference is that your site is set to charset=ISO-8859-1 and not charset=UTF-8.  But from the source I can't see why it's doing what it's doing in IE.  Other than IE sucks

[Janet]

Huh...

But you see, I would get that if we changed something. But we haven't changed anything! That's the weird thing, we never changed the settings, just a few colors but we did that a long time ago. And we tried to get back to the original colors too but that didn't work either 

Whaaaaaaaaa    What more can we do? Besides telling our members that IE sucks?

[Rumbaar]

This is why we always suggest not to edit the default CORE theme, as I would now offer the suggestion to check if it's still occurring in the CORE theme.  Other than that I'm stumped.

[Tony Reid]

Curious - does it happen if you disable the newsfader?

[oclotusclub]

I am having the same problem with using Internet Explorer to access my web site/forum at www.oclotusclub.com [nofollow] (which actually redirects to www.oclotusclub.com/forum [nofollow] using a index.php redirect file.)  I noticed that my problem seems to be identical to the one at http://www.julieandrewsonline.com/forum/index.php [nofollow] and http://universalmonsterarmy.com/forum/. [nofollow]

I have changed nothing on my forum configuration and web site since March 2007 and everything has worked great that whole time. As of Friday night (Dec. 21, 2007), however, I could no longer access the site using Internet Explorer. I did not experience the "blinking" - I just could no longer access it in both IE 6 & 7.

The forum can be accessed and the forum functions just fine with Firefox and Opera, as well as on my Treo PDA browser.  I have not tested it with Safari, but I have someone I know who uses that Mac browser to access the site and who has posted something after the problem started occurring with IE, so he must be getting the forum just fine.

I am using SMF 1.1.4 with a minimal installation of Mods, only the Gallery Lite and a Mod which sorts the topics within the boards to my specification.  I am also using the PDX-DK Theme by padexx.  I have always kept all modifications to a minimum to make the site's maintenance simpler for me.

My web hosting company is Yahoo, which may be the key as I noticed that someone else here has mentioned that they are also using Yahoo and having similar problems. I have tested my MySQL database and it is connecting fine. My PHP version is 4.3.11 (Build Date Sep 22 2005 14:19:27) on a FreeBSD 4.11 system at Yahoo is working fine too.

I did notice something odd, though. If I try to access the site with IE (unsuccessfully), then hit the Back button many times, there have been times when a page does display, however, the small section where the SMF and Theme information is usually displayed (using JavaScript) is missing or appears broken.

Any help getting my web site back up on IE would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Sean

The OC Lotus Club
www.oclotusclub.com

[fmofmpls]

I am the owner of the site http://universalmonsterarmy.com/forum which is suffering from the exact same problems that are spoken of here. While I do have several different mods installed, I only started having this trouble about two weeks ago. Up until then, everything had been working fine. I must admit, I'm finding some small comfort here in knowing that I'm not alone in this frustrating problem. I recently migrated an entire Yahoo group that was 5 yrs old over to my new forum and now this is happening! Argghhh!

I have noticed one common denominator amongst the three different groups affected here. We all use Yahoo as our host. That leads me to believe it's a hosting issue. Did Yahoo do something to it's server adjustments which conflict with SMF in some way? I think it's more than a coincidence that the three afflicted groups all use Yahoo for their hosts.

I'm not going to give up until I know what is the cause of this problem, and I would invite all the affected parties to remain in close touch with me with their findings and any possible solutions. You may PM me, e-mail me, even call me on the darn telephone. I need help from anyone in anyway!

[TC Carl]

I have changed nothing on my forum configuration and web site since March 2007 and everything has worked great that whole time. As of Friday night (Dec. 21, 2007), however, I could no longer access the site using Internet Explorer. I did not experience the "blinking" - I just could no longer access it in both IE 6 & 7.


Exact same thing here, and it started Friday. See the topic "Site unstable with Internet Explorer." here - we are all having this common problem.

[oclotusclub]

Okay, I was on the phone with Yahoo Business Web Hosting support for an hour today (Sunday 10:45 am, December 23, 2007) and they have escalated this problem to their higher-level engineering technical support staff.  I explained the problem fully to the initial tech support person, and he gave me a Yahoo Support Ticket number which is #6562783.

He mentioned that if others on this SMF support forum who are experiencing this Yahoo/SMF/IE problem can call in and create another Support Ticket for themselves, it may help to get the problem resolved more quickly. He explained that the more Support Tickets that come in describing the same issue, the more they will give attention to it and assign more higher-level tech support people to the problem.  Make sure that when you call that you give them my ticket number, which may reduce the amount of initial troubleshooting by your first line tech support person.  I also gave him the URL's to the two threads here (see below) where we have described our problems and isolated them to Yahoo Web Hosting.

Here is the number for Yahoo! Small Business Technical Support: (800) 318-0783
Again, my Yahoo Support Ticket number is: #6562783

I have tested this on IE 6 and have the same problem using that version of IE.  I have not tested it with IE 5, though, as I do not have a computer with that version of IE on it anymore.  Knowing that it is happening with older versions of IE might help to prove and discount that it is not an IE 7 upgrade sent up by Microsoft.

Something that is unusual is that this Yahoo tech support person can get to my forum just fine, as well as the other three forums mentioned in this thread just fine (www.julieandrews.com/forum, www.tc-voices.com/forum [nofollow], www.universalmonsterarmy.com/forum [nofollow]). My tech support person said that Yahoo does go out to the Internet to reach their servers, but through a T3 connection using a VPN, so that may be how they can still access our sites/forums just fine. Basically it sounds like they have a direct line into their web hosting servers.  I have tested this at different locations using different ISP's and connections (DSL and Cable) and I still cannot get through to my forum.

One last thing I did notice that is common with our forums is that we are all redirecting users into a forum which is a subdirectory within our domain (www.oclotusclub.com/forum). I doubt this is part of the problem, but it is something I did notice.  I used to have a index.php file automatically redirect users into the forum, but have since changed it to a manual redirection index.html file (a basic "click-through" page) on my main domain at www.oclotusclub.com [nofollow], with a description of the problem for our forum members.  Either way, you still cannot see the forum.

I am sure as the weekend and holiday winds down, more people with this Yahoo Hosting & SMF combination will discover this problem. Maybe the SMF Forum moderators can move and consolidate all threads regarding this issue into a more descriptive thread title, such as "Yahoo Hosting / IE / SMF Forum Access Problem" or something of the sort.  I have noted that there are currently two threads in this SMF Forum describing this same issue:

"Site unstable with Internet Explorer"
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=212563.0

Forum keeps opening the page so it keeps "blinking"
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=212514.0

Thanks for any help you guys can provide. I hope we can all get this resolved soon, it's going on three days now and I need to enjoy my holiday! 

Cheers,
Sean

The OC Lotus Club
www.oclotusclub.com

[fmofmpls]

Dear Sean. Thank you so very much for making the call and including my forum url as an example! I really appreciate it!

I sent off an e-mail earlier today to Yahoo support explaining the entire matter in detail. I also included your forum link as well as the Julie Andrews forum url. 

I will make the phone call now and will be sure to include your ticket # as a reference. I know what you mean about trying to enjoy your holiday with this techno-mess on your mind!

Please do update us on any of your findings, and I will be sure to do the same!

[Janet]

Thank you Sean and fmofmpls, we're on it too.

Let's get this thing solved! Happy Holidays to you both 

[fmofmpls]

Just got off the phone with Yahoo support. They are aware of the problem and they said they are looking into it. Thanks to Sean's call, they said they are aware of the affected forums that have been listed here. I too was given a support ticket #. They promise they will be responding back within 3 -5 business days. I plan on calling them back the day after Christmas.

Everyone stay in touch here with any updates. Thanks, and Happy Holidays!