I just bought this site

[TheVat]

Whoa! My posts are going through before I've even had chance to finish writing the last

What's even more amazing is that you were able to hit the submit button as those last words were snatched away from you.

[wolfhnd]

Reasonable optimism makes life better.

[TheVat]

Unreasonable optimism makes sex better.

[wolfhnd]

Unreasonable optimism makes sex better.

Depends on what you catch

[BioWizard]

hahaaaaa

[BioWizard]

wolf, Biv said sex, not the rest of your life afterwards. In that respect, his statement is accurate.

[kudayta]

I'm siding with wolf here. Unreasonable optimism could lead to some sort of booby trapped orifice.

[wolfhnd]

I'm siding with wolf here. Unreasonable optimism could lead to some sort of booby trapped orifice.

I was thinking of you when I typed those words sinner :-)

[wolfhnd]

Just checked and there are 17.000 more or less members, 125 users at the moment 6 of those being registered. What do people come here for if they don't post? Perhaps a better question is why don't they make posts? I don't doubt that there are topics that many people are interested in but I usually research a topic before I search forums to see if people are discussing them. Writing clarifies your thoughts in a way reading can never do so I recommend to everyone just browsing to participate. I don't see the down side myself.

[Faradave]

Writing clarifies your thoughts in a way reading can never do

Agreed! Harboring an impression is one thing, crafting a communicable message is quite another.

[TheVat]

Bear in mind a large fraction of those 17000 members came here to sell testosterone boosters. And another large fraction were here years ago, let their interests follow their natural course, then moved on. And a lot of the 125 visitors at that moment were bots or spammers who realized active links are blocked when you first join, or they were kids looking for free homework tips or snippets to copy/paste into their assignments. Some are veteran members just peeking in the door, maybe checking on a couple old threads. Lots of reasons people surf through here without posting.

[wolfhnd]

Bear in mind a large fraction of those 17000 members came here to sell testosterone boosters. And another large fraction were here years ago, let their interests follow their natural course, then moved on. And a lot of the 125 visitors at that moment were bots or spammers who realized active links are blocked when you first join, or they were kids looking for free homework tips or snippets to copy/paste into their assignments. Some are veteran members just peeking in the door, maybe checking on a couple old threads. Lots of reasons people surf through here without posting.

I'm aware that a lot of traffic is meaningless in terms of the quality of the website. I'm not even sure that the cozy little place that people have built here on the web is a bad thing. On the other hand I'm interested in how internet forums in the broader sense such as YouTube finance themselves and remain viable. I see a lot of people complaining about demonetization of their content on YouTube and the obvious liberal bias but I don't see anyone worried about the Billion dollars that YouTube loses every year. The more traffic you have the greater the cost to maintain functionality. A free internet doesn't mean one that doesn't cost anything. The infra structure is very expensive and someone has to pay for it. A website like this is very inexpensive to operate so it really isn't an issue. I don't find ads offensive if they do not reduce functionality nor do I mind someone trying to operate the website for a profit but it could lead to censorship of content if it grew in popularity sufficiently (I don't see that happening). My post was motivated more by curiosity about the traffic numbers etc. which I could look up myself if I wasn't so lazy :-)

[Watson]

Has any one else noticed the posts bouncing up or down as you try and read it? Any one notice it is because of the ad in the OP cycling from ad, to no ad, to ad, to no ad........
Can that be fixed?
Even this page bounces as the banner ad appears above.................and then disappears???????????
On or off. Pick one.

[wolfhnd]

Has any one else noticed the posts bouncing up or down as you try and read it? Any one notice it is because of the ad in the OP cycling from ad, to no ad, to ad, to no ad........
Can that be fixed?
Even this page bounces as the banner ad appears above.................and then disappears???????????
On or off. Pick one.

I have noticed that posts sometimes get oddly spaced lines, at least in Android.

[wolfhnd]

I would like more results in New posts if that is easy to do?

[Watson]

With all this bouncing the page does makes it very hard to concentrate on what you are reading. I suspect longer posts will go unread, or at least not be fully digested with all these visual interruptions.

[TheVat]

Watson: Am not getting any bounce, either on an Android 5.1 tablet or a Win 10 desktop. I wonder what OS you have and what build.
Can you turn off graphics and just load text?

Wolf: not sure how you would get more results for New Posts, beyond inducing more members to post.

[toucana]

I am getting significant and irritating visual bounce when trying to read or post on the SCF site.

My browser is Safari 11.1
My OS is El Capitan - Mac OS X 10.11.6

There are two solutions available in Safari 11.1

i. Go to the Develop menu in Safari and click 'Disable Images'.

ii. Go to the main Safari menu and click Preferences, and under the 'Websites' tab select 'Reader'. If the SCF page is open you will see an On/Off toggle to select a text only 'Reader' mode for this website.

The second option is probably the best one if you are reading a substantial article. Not all websites support this Reader mode function, but fortunately the SCF website does. If you are a migraine sufferer, or sensitive to visual effects then it is a boon.

[Watson]

I'm glad it is not just me, or my system. I went back into this site preferences and changed the imiges back to off. It hasn't helped, yet. Hopefully it takes time time process the change.


I just looked again and it is to stop images within a post. Darn.
So BiV, do the ads on your PC just stay there? Our's pop in and then pop out. It is the ad space that keeps opening and closing that is shifting the text up and then down.

[zetreque]

I used to have that awful "bounce" you speak of. I don't think it was on this website but on others. It's like a rotating ad and the ads are different sizes which move the page content.

What I had problems with in the past too was sound in ads. That's totally unethical. I ended up installing a browser add-on that automatically mutes every tab default. And I really hate ads that automatically play video.

[Watson]

The ads here are cycling, but there is a space between and there is nothing so the space closes and then reopens with a new ad, so the text all the way down is bouncing. Can we not just have a static ad, that just stays?? This is the clean look we were talking about earlier. That is what is lost.

[TheVat]

I'm glad it is not just me, or my system. I went back into this site preferences and changed the imiges back to off. It hasn't helped, yet. Hopefully it takes time time process the change.


I just looked again and it is to stop images within a post. Darn.
So BiV, do the ads on your PC just stay there? Our's pop in and then pop out. It is the ad space that keeps opening and closing that is shifting the text up and then down.

Well, this is odd, but I'm not getting any ads lately. In fact, I've only seen a couple in the past few weeks, and they were static banners for some sort of graduate training program.

Toucan is correct, that either Reader mode or Disable Images should help, once it takes effect. (Disabling images, IIRC, doesn't happen until you reboot your machine)

Also, is it possible you have cookies or other junk in your cache that is attracting flashy ads? Go to your settings menu and see if you can clear those out.

[mitchellmckain]

I am quite amazed at the audacity of these sites which keep telling us that we should disable our protections because the advertisements support the site. What a load of nonsense! If they want to advertise then THEY can darn well stop trying to take over my computer. I get plenty of adds which do not do this so it is ridiculous to claim that I am preventing their advertising. NO SITE is worth having overbearing advertisers dominate your computer with a bunch of excessive advertising. THEY can be the ones to just tone it down and do their advertising with the restrictions what my computer allows them to do.

[toucana]

btw

We appear to have lost the ability to upload any new image file attachments to the News Discussion forum (as well as losing all the linked files we had uploaded in the past).

Is this a new policy or simply a misconfiguration issue ? News stories are one type of discussion thread where images are often highly pertinent and informative.

[Event Horizon]

I think it might be interesting to investigate age/gender demographics pertaining to the active users of the site. It could be that for purposes of balance the site can do more to attract more than mainly middle aged men as I suspect it to be. It was a woman that aided Alan Turing crack the Enigma code, Marie Curie gave us nuclear medicine and Lisa Stanford who although she died of accidental strychnine poisoning (if I recall) was an eminent researcher and Universities were named in her honor.
Women also work in all strata of science now, there are no more male preserves in science, and as a man I would like to think that we reflect that here too.
It would be interesting to run the numbers and see what the results say.

[Watson]

So not only are there bouncing ads to make reading an annoying task, we also get redirected, without touching anything, to gambling sights. Just reading a post, and boom, new site that I have no fucking interest in.