20 posts tagged “six apart”

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.’

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.

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!

A surprising thing happened tonight: I could no longer get a compose window at my second Vox account.
   I have done some more neighbour removals (after the clue from Kimmie) to see if it made any difference. While that account is working again, I could not relate the glitch to any particular neighbour. In fact, I have the same neighbours I did prior to the glitch occurring there.
   I tried removing a few more here to see if it made any difference to whether a compose screen would appear. In all cases, it did not. If you are a Voxer who was puzzled why I added you to my neighbourhood today, when you know full well I had added you before, it was down to this experiment.
   This compose window took 12 hours to emerge, so the weeding-out of dormant and departed neighbours yesterday has had no real effect on this account. Removing neighbours added in October 2009 also made no difference.
   I am a stubborn fellow, more so when I know that by solving my problem, we potentially solve Patricia’s and Ninja’s, with their composing-blocks of varying degrees here on Vox. Here’s hoping Six Apart is as willing to get to the bottom of this as I am.

Despite still having some compose-window blackouts over a few hours today, December 8 marks the day when Vox has given me 10 compose windows within minutes, a record.
   I’m still not sure which neighbour might be causing the glitch, after Kimmie at Six Apart gave me a clue that it might be someone I was following that began my problems back in October.
   I spent the day deleting dormant and dead accounts, as well as some added in October. While things aren’t perfect, they are better than they were last week, when I had another 24-hour block.
   So it’s time to share a few videos again. I finally watched a recording of the most recent David Tennant Doctor Who special, ‘The Waters of Mars’. (I missed it due to a business trip last week.) I didn’t think it was that great, but since we have two Tennant stories left, I know we are building up to a pretty impressive finalé. There were more references to David Bowie (the Mars base was named after him), which got me thinking about Life on Mars again …

I don’t know if we can pronounce Vox fixed, but this is the seventh compose window this morning. It took about a minute to come up.
   I’ve had so many of these temporary successes getting the compose screen, only to find that I am barred from composing for another day afterwards. However, I might have reason to say that the glitches are becoming a thing of the past.
   Earlier today, Kimmie at Six Apart responded to a thread to say that the error was caused by someone I am following. So, I spent this morning removing all dead Vox accounts among my neighbourhood. I then removed those that had not updated since December 2008 (an arbitrary month I chose), with the exception of people I knew. I got several compose windows within minutes, but I still got two of these, which meant the problem did not lie with those accounts:

   Taking Kimmie’s clue about a neighbour who might have caused this, I began removing people I started following in October 2009. There were two gentlemen with photo blogs whom I removed, and since then, the compose window has come up, though not as quickly as I would like. (To those two guys: sorry, it’s nothing personal.)
   I wonder how many hours I have spent on this since October 28, but I think we are finally getting to the bottom of it.
   It’s still a Vox bug, in my opinion—why would the mere act of following someone, which is something that Vox is programmed for, create a problem? The answer of ‘Because it just does’ is not good enough.
   Event A (following certain neighbours) has triggered Event B (“don’t load the compose window for this guy!”) but they haven’t come across why or how the two are linked.
   I’ve told Patricia and Ninja of what the error might be, so hopefully we’ve fixed things not just for me, but two other Voxers.
   And there should now be a record of this bug and its resolution, which is one great thing about the internet.
   Well, let’s hope it was a resolution. If not, then at least we are narrowing down on the cause of the glitch. But I wonder if we would have got this far if I hadn’t pestered Daisy to the extent that I did (poor Daisy!).

Hmm, is it fixed? It still took a minute or two for the compose window to come up, but that’s better than hours (or days). It came up by itself, without refreshes. Are more recent neighbours safe?
   I’m heading over to tell Patricia on her Facebook what Kimmie told me, and see if this helps her.
   Though if it were the mere act of following a neighbour on Vox that started this whole bug, then what does it say about that Voxer? And why should the rest of us who are innocent be dragged down with someone with a troublesome account?
   It’s still a Vox bug, but at least we can get to the bottom of it (eventually).

Removing dead accounts didn’t work, so I removed all Voxers from my neighbourhood who have not blogged since the end of 2008. I made exceptions for those whom I know either personally or got to know well over the internet, although those folks who have moved on out of Vox were also removed. Though I am still sceptical that this compose window wasn’t a fluke …
   We will soon know after a little more testing, but it looks like I am coming to the end of my hassles on Vox after nearly two months.
   The next step is to see whom I might have begun to follow around October 2009 if the 28th of the month was when I began experiencing “the block”.

If you’ve been following the ‘Forced into it’ thread at my other Vox blog, you’ll find that Six Apart does have yet another person who cares! Kimmie responded today and identified that I might be following someone in my neighbourhood that has caused the block (in composing posts—thanks, Kimmie). I’ve just removed all dead accounts in my neighbourhood and admittedly, I just got this compose window in a regular time. (Though as I have seen all too often since October 28, these have always been flukes.)
   However, since we’ve narrowed down the likely glitch, I am feeling a bit more confident that this blog is back. Look out for a second post, assuming the dead-neighbour theory is right.
   If not, I will have to go through the neighbour list and see who might be a spammer whom Vox doesn’t like, and remove them next.