Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum New SEARCH Function - Your Feedback?

In my humble opinion, the most serious problem with the Piano World site lies not in the search but in a serious problem in one of the scripts.

I use both Firefox and Opera, and both browsers occasionally, very spuriously, crash and occasionally even blue screen the whole machine. This only happens when the PianoWorld site is open. It happens on Windows XP and Vista OSes, Firefox and Opera browsers (the only two I use), and on multiple computers.

I suspect the Amber Alerts crawler at the bottom, but that's a very rough guess.

That's never happened to me: Firefox (with some NoScript here and there) on Vista.

Interesting.

That's the first I've heard of this problem. We have 53,000+ members, and over 17,000 unique visitors a day.

If it were an issue, I would presume others would be reporting the same thing.

I'm not saying it couldn't/didn't happen, just that it may be isolated to a specific set of circumstances.

There are by the way thousands of sites with the code amber code. We've had it for years now with no reported issues.

If your computer is blue screening then it's not the fault of the website, or even the browser, you have some issue with your OS (or drivers). Not to say that some element on a particular website is causing your browser to do something that eventually leads to this, but the fault lies squarely on the software, not the site. Wouldn't surprise me at all if your issue is with Flash, since it is common on websites but also has hooks into the OS that can cause catastrophic failure. I'd start with updating/reinstalling Flash and work from there.

I'm not sure that it's the Amber code. That's just a suspicion as it is the only thing (other than animated gifs, which likely are not problematic) that has constant event-driven updates. It's likely a thread safety issue.

I develop software for a living and usually find myself on the other end of trouble tickets with reports like this. The bluescreens, in fact, often occur at the same time I'm building code in Visual Studio 2008 - itself an unstable environment. To be fair, the worst-offending machine is itself unstable.

Frank, good improvement. Thanks for adding it to PW.

BTW, Frank, the new search is a great improvement! I did not mean to pour cold water on that, so sorry for that.

You're offloading the search function onto a cluster specifically adapted for searching, effectively utilizing a COTS solution. You 1) improve the search capabilities and at the same time 2) improve performance.

Very well done!

Nice, Frank! Thanks for taking the time to listen to us grumble & then give us something new & improved. It's much appreciated.

FWIW, using Firefox (always latest "stable" version)on XP, Vista, and 7 on various machines, I have never experienced any of the crashes gerg describes. I also doubt it has anything to do with Flash. The only flash I see on the site is in (very few) ads. I have experienced some crashes when I have tried out "alpha" and "beta" bersions of Firefox, but that is to be expected. I literally cannot remember the last time I experienced a crash with a stable version of Firefox on any of the machines I have (even the old XP machine). My browsing habits on PW may be a bit unorthodox in that I open every thread that interests me in tabs, and view them one by one until I'm done. Sometimes I literally have two dozen tabs open at once. I would think anything that was going to cause a crash would be worsened by the strain on resources that many open tabs represents. Then again, I am a fairly experienced tinkerer, but not a software developer, so I could be wrong.

Two questions, which may be related to the new search engine.

1) Why are there now little red circle/triangle icons everywhere? (Clicking on them seems to link to a blank screen).

2) Why are there now vertical scroll bars on every single message window? Again, they don't seem to have any purpose, since there is no need to scroll.

Both of these detract from the former clean cut look of the forums.

Thanks,
Lawrence

1.) A glitch in the ShareThis software, being fixed by them as we speak.

2.) Not sure what you mean about vertical scroll bars on every message window.
A specific example?

Best,

Frank B.
Piano World

Google custom search rocks. Well done Frank. As to forum software, have you ever considered phpBB? I admin a couple of phpBB 3 forums and I've been very impressed with it. Could save some $$ since it is free and open source.

When I read this message for example, there is a scroll bar immediately to the right of the message, but there is no need to scroll, due to the size of the message. If you're not seeing this, it is perhaps something to do with my settings?

After posting this, I note that the scroll bar appears on every message on the page. I can do a screen shot, if helpful.