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Sat 6 Sep, 2003 10:19 am
Excuse me, but does anyone elsel have a very weird screen this morning, only in A2K, with images which look like A2K license plates in black, blue, and orange plastered all over the place? I've seen reference to this somewhere, that it's due to someone having posted a very long link, spreading the screen, and something about "hotlinks". Will it be fixed?
Screen view seems normal to me, Tartarin ... could you maybe post a query over on the Help Forum with a little more detail? If there's a problem, we should get it looked at.
Nope -- forum help seems to be locked. I noticed earlier this morning in another thread, someone else complained about it and apparently it's due to CI having posted a very long link. Don't know how to remedy.
Somethin' else is goin' on with your problem, Tartarin ... Forum Help isn't locked. A long link can stretch a page, but I don't notice that goin' on here, and other than just expanding page width beyond normal screen borders, a long link would have no other effect. That "License Plate" thing you mention has me totally confused. What browser and version are you using? Is anyone else on this thread experiencing similar problems? I'd like to get to the bottom of this, for everyone's benefit.
Same old Microsoft Explorer that comes with Windows ME. I also belong to other forums and am not having a problem. You may want to check other threads and see where that post was (this morning, early) about having problems.
A huge series of license-plate size (almost) images runs down the left side of the very wide page, between poster's name and when they joined, etc. Able(blue)2(black)Know(orange).com (black). Slick graphics. Above, in black, it reads "Image replaced by hotlink protection" and below "Please do not hotlink our images". The index pages are normal. My computer is running fine; a forum I belong to with the same software Craven uses is working fine. It started when I came in this morning -- was okay last night. I noticed CI's long link -- someone asked him to remove it... That's all I know!
Weird ... hope you don't mind, Im gonna split this off to The Help Forum.
Edit: This series of interactions was split from:
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2564&start=2130
I see what you're talking about, Tartarin.
One of the skyscraper ads seems like it might be a really stretched-out version (as it appears on my screen) of one of the A2K ads that Monger has in his sig. It's hard to tell because it's so stretched. I copied the image, not sure how it will show up here:
[image removed]
When I click on it, I am taken to this page (Alexa):
[link removed]
Huh. Well, what I copied shows up fine in that post, but it appeared really stretched (vertically) and unreadably on my screen.
OK, a few clicks and it was there again. When I click "properties", I get this:
[link removed]
But how it looks to the naked eye is:
Illegible black font, maybe 10-20 letters, stretched way vertically.
A recognizable if majorly stretched (vertically) "Able2Know", much larger font, blue "Able", black "2", orange "Know", black ".com".
More illegible black font, fewer letters, same size as top font, maybe 8-12 letters.
That happened all the day (it's 9:34 pm here), too.
I've been experiencing several browser page display errors on A2K this morning, so much so that it kicked me offline twice today already, not just off A2K but offline. Seems to be happening in the threads with large photographs such as Chailya's (sp?).
Hasn't happened on any other sites with a large amount of photos.
Ya think those aliens living on that new body over Pasadena are messing with us in an attempt to diffuse interest in their deathstar? All this grief just because someone forgot to turn their cloaking device on?
I'm feelin' sorta lonley here ... I haven't seen any errors of the sort ... IE6/ XP, IE 5.5/ Win ME, or IE 5/Win 98SE. Opera 7.2 on XP seems to be working fine too.
Now that I am paying attention (I usually kind of tune out the ads), I notice that the stretchy "Able2Know" and the Alexa skyscraper (which displays properly) are the only things that seem to appear -- I think there is usually more of a rotation. (This is based on maybe 25 viewings since I have been paying attention.)
Hmmmm .... just had a thought here ... disabled my firewall and my adblocker, and I got the skyscraper (which normally I don't see), but even refreshing the page or clicking to other pages a few times didn't give me the error.
I don't know why, but it's all normal since I've been first on this thread.
timberlandko wrote:Hmmmm .... just had a thought here ... disabled my firewall and my adblocker, and I got the skyscraper (which normally I don't see), but even refreshing the page or clicking to other pages a few times didn't give me the error.
I think you're on the right trail, Timber. I've been watching my firewall log going nuts with warning reports of incoming UPD and TCP. Cleared it once already this morning when it got over 100 entries. It is back up to 42 entries again.
Looks like one of the ads is being rather persistent and insistent. It is possible that the browser error only occurs if you are viewing a page with large photo sizes at the same time this ad appears in the randomizer and the browser gives up on traffic control and just sends them both to their rooms.
Grrr, I fixed it. I spent a few hours writing deteailed .htaccess files and apparently it doesn't work.
If anyone saw the hotlinking image please let me know what proxy, ISP, firwall etc you use that might fudge the referrer.
BTW, BFN, I am trying to stop people from hotlinking images here and using our bandwidth. I noticed that you are one of the people hotlinking your avatar here to another site. Please don't do this.
The bandwidth from hotlinked images alone is costing me a fortune.
I've been getting that A2K skyscraper thing as well.
Just read the thread, it has nothing to do with ads.
What I am trying to do is prevent people from stealing our bandwidth. People are using images they upload as avatars here on other sites and the bandwidth from hotlinked avatars alone has exceeded 100 GB in the last 6 days. This represents a lot of money for me.
So what I did was write .htaccess files that replace hotlinked images with that big ugly ass file.
Thing is, I did it perfectly formy setup and for most others.
And I did in fact spent hours trying to write it so that it would work for everyone (e,g, I allowed blank referrers in teh htaccess code).
But it didn't work (again) and I'm back to square one.
I'll rewrite the scripts later and see how it goes.
If you still see that image clear your browser cache.