andersabrahamsson’s Neighborhood

Days blocked on Vox bis

Key to the calendar. Yellow: days when Vox worked normally. Pink: days when the compose screen took minutes or hours to load. Red: days when Vox would not allow me to compose at all.

I’m sure most of you will agree that putting up with a compose screen that will not load for hours or days since October 28 is being pretty patient.
   In that time, Daisy and Six Apart have been great at trying to help me troubleshoot why this is happening. They have confirmed that there is something wrong and that, even at Six Apart HQ in California, they cannot get the compose screen to come up when logged on as me.
   A number of solutions have been proposed, but despite carrying them out, the loading delay remains intolerably long.
   It’s as though the Six Apart servers (after becoming self-aware!) know it’s me and fail to serve the compose page. No code is downloaded.
   I remain convinced that whatever is happening to me is connected to what happened to Patricia (who has only made 50-odd posts on Vox, but has exactly the same symptoms) and Ninja (who can no longer compose with this site without switching to Internet Explorer—Vox is the only site which he has to make a browser switch for). I also believe the bug is connected to the one that locked out all the Australians I knew on this service in August 2009.
   We also have the mysterious period between November 16 and 18 when the site operated normally, and the compose screen came up on demand. What happened on those three days? I had more tags in my account than when the site first blocked me from composing, and possibly more neighbours. Yet for those days, everything was normal here.
   I have never suggested seriously that the block was malicious (though it was fun to entertain some outlandish theories), but it does seem to be rather coincidental that I come across bugs on Vox, Blogger, Facebook and other services continually. Many have been documented on this blog. I just never thought that among the last regular blog posts, the bugs I write about would be Vox’s.
   One day I am sure they will find the error, or there will be a new version of Vox which remedies it. The underlying code is updated a lot more frequently with incremental improvements than Team Vox will have us know. Until then, I will check in here periodically—to read your posts, delete spammers, and administer the many groups that I run—but we will have to say farewell to my regular updates. I will also click on ‘Create’ from time to time to see if the bug has been fixed, and, if the site ever lets me, post the odd private neighbourhood or friends-only entry.
   Finally, you could say, my disappointment outweighed my patience. As some of you read in a private post yesterday, this is a good time to move on.
   Vox is, after all, still in beta, if its terms and conditions (revised a few months ago) are to be believed, so there’s no point my getting mad about this. It is what I signed up for in 2006 when I began as a Vox beta tester. Three years on, it appears I was still in the same boat, but with a less reliable site.
   Thank you for all your friendships over the last three years. I have enjoyed it and everything this blog has offered. You can still find me on Facebook (a site with far worse issues than Vox ever had), Tumblr and at my main blog, where I am already ramping up the posting I do. I have a campaign site for the 2010 mayoral election here in Wellington, and will offer occasional commentary at Lucire’s web edition. If the Vox cravings get too much, I might enter the odd thing at lucire.vox.com, but even that account began to fail a few days ago.
   This is not a total farewell. In the words of Gen Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall return.’

A sunny day in Wellington, even if it took over half a day to get a compose screen on Vox. I’m already blogging more on Blogger, so I suspect these posts will become fewer (and not out of choice). This was around 5 p.m. today:

Victoria Street outside the CPO, summer 2009

Not sure how many hours it has been since Vox was capable of loading a compose window for me. I lost count. I no longer believe that deleting tags has helped, especially as it is now 2.20 a.m. and I had no access to Vox all evening. Please write me with your next theory, Vox.
   As a result of the return to terrible load times, Kimmie’s theory about a dodgy neighbour might still be true. I haven’t deleted everyone from my neighbourhood and started from scratch, which is arguably the next step, if I have sufficient time to waste.
   I have downloaded Firebug (thanks to my friend Andrew Carr-Smith) to see what data Vox loads on to my browser in the times I get a blank compose screen. Answer: none. Nothing even begins to load.
   I still think the Vox server knows when it’s me, Patricia or Ninja, or any of the others who might have left here without telling us why, and fails to serve any compose screen to us. I still reckon that there is something peculiar about our accounts that the programming does not like.

I’m getting paranoid importing from YouTube because of the tags they introduce, and tags might be one of the reasons it takes me hours to get a compose screen on Vox. However, this one came up on demand, which is a relief.
   I showed this to my neighbourhood yesterday, but as the YouTube one is public, I have no problems sharing it more widely. It was my TV appearance last month on CTV, with Angela and Megan on Good Living. This was not networked, but it was very fun to do. The set reminded me a bit of the Good Morning one at Avalon, except I got one thing that I was promised but never got: a subtitle with both my and Lucire’s names.

Statistics: I have stripped out 6 kbyte worth of tags from the 260 kbyte I had yesterday afternoon. The file is now c. 254 kbyte. Pretty sucky for nearly four hours’ work, but we are talking about undoing three years of blogging here.
   I can’t say I’ve noticed major improvements to Vox’s compose screen coming up. I suppose one could say this now takes minutes rather than hours or days, and it sometimes comes up without a refresh (if you give it a quarter- or half-hour).
   Back to work.

Here’s a question for the Javascript boffins. When I began giving my username and password out, two people got it: Robin and Daisy at Six Apart. Daisy was able to confirm that it was nearly impossible to compose as me, even from Six Apart HQ. Robin (correct me if I am wrong) was able to get the compose window on a mobile device.
   My theory is that the mobile device loaded limited Javascript, and since the tags are in a Javascript script, they were not called.
   However, to put that theory to the test, I turned off Java and Javascript in Firefox, to see if the compose window would materialize. Again, I got our old friend, the blank screen. So, any Javascript geeks out there willing to give me some advice?
   Now, I am sure my tags are down to the level that they were at before October 28 (although I still have a lot), and I have a far smaller group of Vox neighbours, but Vox is not trouble-free.
   And when I look at Patricia’s site, she doesn’t have that many tags.
   I’m giving the other site a try right now and see if I can repeat my glitch from last night. If I can, that means cutting back on tags has not helped, and we can relaunch the more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Interesting. Despite removing tags for nearly three hours, which should, in theory, bring me back to the quantity of tags I had before October 28, the compose window still took half an hour to load. I’m beginning to wonder if it was a wild goose chase. But it still remains the most plausible explanation out of all the ones I have heard so far.

The compose window is still taking around a quarter-hour to open, but I am happy with Daisy’s explanation. I believe I am back to the quantity of tags that I was at before the problems began, and have been deleting a lot from the videos—since almost all of the YouTube ones are incorrect. (Either the person on YouTube entered them incorrectly, or YouTube does not allow phrases as tags. Hence there are a lot of tags here with words such as the and of.)
   Even after the trimming I have done (which has taken some two hours today), we are still looking at a Javascript script of nearly 260 kbyte. That’s hefty, no matter how you look at it.
   I am not sure if that answers Patricia’s problem, and it doesn’t answer the trouble I began experiencing on my other blog last night, but it is a clue.
   There must be some related issues (server load, sploggers, etc.) but intuitively, the tag explanation sounds correct.
   The Javascript is also executed reasonably early on the compose page, so if it fails to load, then the rest of the compose screen will not come up.
   I am no expert, but Vox will need to look at this in an upcoming update. Maybe the script could be executed later. Or, for heavy users, perhaps take away the tag auto-complete feature. I usually type so quickly that I do not benefit from the feature anyway: when it shows up, I have already finished typing the tag.
   I’ll continue to delete some more tags, but I think my Vox blog will soon be back.

Although this compose window still took a while, Daisy got back to me with a new theory, one that sounds very plausible, about why I had been having so much trouble.
   When each compose window loads, it comes with one’s tags (if you look at the source code for a compose window, there is a whole line of them). It is to enable Vox’s auto-complete feature for the tags.
   Since I have blogged a lot in the last three years, and introduced a lot of tags, the server appears to time out when loading them with the compose window.
   While the video and photo windows also have these tags, I assume they have less code on them.
   It doesn’t explain why I had a problem with my second Vox account last night (could it be the cookies?), but I have spent just over an hour today removing tags, seeing if they would make a difference. Most of the unwanted tags on this blog have come in via YouTube video imports, so I’ve focused my efforts there.
   Patricia was a regular Vox user and I suspect she will have had her share of tags that led to her problems. However, she only fielded a few dozen posts per annum, so it makes me wonder. She has some long tags, so maybe that was it?
   While the tag auto-complete a user-friendly feature, if it causes this much grief, I would not object to having it switched off.
   It is still too early to tell if removing some of the tags has helped, but I believe we will soon find a solution. Thanks, Daisy!