Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

A couple of the images pasted into comments on that page are slower to load than the page itself.

As a timeline it looks like this:

• 0 milliseconds "Load page please!"
  
• 257 milliseconds "Page loaded, need to fetch some stuff before showing you anything"
  
• 676 milliseconds "Got everything from the local site, I'll jump to the post you want and will show the page"
  
• 865 milliseconds "Hot damn, there's an image to load further up the page, going to have to shuffle the page down"
  
• 1.03 seconds "Holy moly, another damn slow image loaded higher up the page, going to have to move the page down a bit more"
  
  

The issue you are reporting is that people are posting images from sites that are slower than LFGSS, and that this forces your browser to make space for them after the page has loaded, which means moving the page down a little.

At 676 milliseconds the page was perfect. Then the slow images made their way through and by 1.03 seconds had passed the #anchor no longer matched the comment it did.

On the specific page you linked to, the slow images were:

• http://www.msgking.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/tuzki18.gif
  
• http://www.freshhealthycooking.com/images/soourdough_with_hooch.jpg
  
  

Those were higher up than the comment the #anchor wanted to jump to, and so the browser moved the page down.

There is absolutely nothing I can do to fix that, unless I make the site extraordinarily aggressive (by downloading all external images as local files and modifying all image tags to include the pre-calculated height and width).

Ok, thank you for the explanation.

Just made me curious as I can't remember having this issue with the old system,
and now on microcosm it's basically the norm..

The old system was slightly slower, it did happen still, but it was less visible as if this page was 200ms slower you wouldn't really notice but it would cause/hide the issue.

The issue you are reporting is that people are posting images from sites that are slower than LFGSS

Hard to believe given the last days...

(sorry I'm just taking the piss)

Microcosm is obviously too fast.

It's also a bug in the browser for me.
Even if the browser doesn't know the size of the images before hand, it should not move the anchor given in the URL down or up, but simply load the images silently and only show the missing part.
I understand is not something easy, and listening to changes in the scroller to move it back to where the anchor is would cause it to zig-zag up and down making it unreadable until all the images are loaded, but still is something that the browsers should handle better.

Yeah, the only real fix today that works well is to have images "reserve" the space on the page. That is... the image tags should know the height and width.

Problem with remote images though, I don't know that stuff.

Yay for bottom menu appearance fix.

I know, I know. The actual bug is more in the UI framework used than in the browser. The ScrollerView or whatever is called in the native UI framework should handle that.

It should expand above or below the visible part of the View. But it doesn't.

Problem with remote images though, I don't know that stuff.

What if you were to add client side javascript to report the dimensions of embedded remote images back to the microcosm server ? Malicious clients could mess it up, but if the server only acted on information for which all reports are unanimous then the worst a malicious client could do is take us back to the situation we're in now.

how long has cmd/ctrl enter done 'post reply'? was on gmail autopilot and was pleasantly surprised.

I have wondered about whether it's feasible to use the embed stuff to pull an image and analyse it.

But that is a hell of a lot of overhead for an edge case bug.

I've just had Cloudflare interrupt proceedings with a "checking your browser before proceeding. DDOS protection by Cloudflare" screen. What is this shit?

Hey @Velocio did you see this http://www.lfgss.com/comments/11854749/ ? Not a big one, just annoying!

CloudFlare is a security and performance company.

If it keeps happening on a particular page or with a particular browser, let us know. Otherwise, I can only see a few occurrences of this in the logs, so we can assume it isn't too prevalent.

Thanks, confirmed. I've raised an issue here: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb/issues/275

About two weeks ago I think? Thanks to @lamby

That can happen if your browser requests are malformed, or you are using an IP address with a poor reputation (i.e. something like Tor, which gets used by spammers and those attacking other sites).

Basically this site, and about 10% of the internet, uses CloudFlare to stop the site being compromised or taken offline. And the basis of that is this idea of IP reputation and good/bad browser requests. If you look kinda odd to that analytical layer, then you're given a challenge to confirm that you are a person and not some nasty bot trying to steal data, or compomise the site.

Christ knows what stands in between my work computer and the internet, but it's a bunch of secure proxies of some kind. Perhaps cloud flare has an aversion to them. Never happened before and then twice in one day just hitting the home page, several minutes or even hours between requests. Either way it puts me off coming to the site (which I am sure is no great loss to many.)

Thanks @lamby!

I like to think the CF page is like a bouncer outside a members' club, making you feel special if you get let in.

Decent clubs have nice polite doormen who greet or salute you. Not bouncers who look you up and down.

You may have noticed in the last few days there has been a plague on the internet called Shellshock.

A very large number of servers have been comprised, and CloudFlare have stopped in excess of 1 million attacks in the last couple of days.

Before CloudFlare turned on their protection for it, the LFGSS and Microcosm servers were being hit by attacks. These attacks, if successful, could devastate any server involved, either giving up all data held on them (or behind them), or by turning them into bots to attack others.

The attacks are real, here is one I logged for someone else to help analyse just an hour ago: http://pastebin.ca/2850408

That specific attack was against the Espruino forum that we host: http://forum.espruino.com/

It is not inconceivable that your employers network hasn't been 100% patched and that there is a compromised machine on your network. If that is the case, then by virtue of you appearing behind the same IP address, you are indeed having your traffic mixed with malware.

CloudFlare are absolutely doing the right thing by issuing challenges. They only ever do so if something is already very badly wrong at the source IP.

I can't say that the challenge you received is because of Shellshock, as there are many reasons that an IP can be scored badly. But it is very very likely.

Oh, and as a metaphor I think it is more akin to border control than a bouncer at a club.

If you turn up looking like you have a contagious disease, or if you appear to be carrying a bomb... then you're going to be put through the grinder.

In your case, it is more like getting off a plane from somewhere like Syria and being asked a few extra questions about the purpose of your stay before you can go and collect your baggage. You might be peeved that others who arrived from Ireland aren't being asked questions, and you may not have realised that you had actually flown by a place currently treated as suspect... but there you go.

You're not against border controls are you?

A couple of the images pasted into comments on that page are slower to load than the page itself.

This also happens on the last page, where there's only that one image of the first post, which is uploaded as an attachement through LFGSS.
Basically this happens pretty much all the time and is really annoying.