@SSteve I have the same problem when I am at home because my internet is complete crap. I would have better luck with dial-up. When I peruse meh at work, it's not problem at all.
It's so fucking user-hostile. It must be a huge money saver for sites somehow, but it's just a big wad of gooey saliva spat directly into users' faces.
@editorkid I don't know what any of this is referring to and I don't see any difference in how the site looks or acts so I'm guessing it must not be quite this bad?
@Bingo The reason I feel so strongly about it is that while it solves the small problem @brhfl mentions below, it ignores the bigger one, which is that you're reading the page but every time you land on a bit of text it has to load every single image above that text, so all of a sudden the text you're reading has jumped maybe 5 or 10 screens below where you've scrolled to. Consumerist is so bad at that that even their share buttons on a normal-sized browser window can quickly have you reading something you read long ago. And that's a problem a lot of us have been complaining about since this forum's earliest days, back when we thought maybe pagination was a great solution to this and almost every other design problem this forum software smacks in our faces.
I know we lusers make everything sound easy, but the Meh forum server should cache appropriately sized images for a day or two after the last activity in a thread. If that comes to maybe a thousand images at a meg apiece, hey, here's a 2GB thumb drive. Go crazy.
@editorkid when a new post is created that has an image, we go figure out what the image dimensions are going to be. That way we can generate an appropriately sized gray placeholder box. Images load in the background and replace the exact size gray box with the actual image when ready. Helps avoid the page jumping around as you've described.
@shawn I've been unlucky, I guess. I'm glad you get it and are apparently ahead of me. If I see any more examples of it here, I'll tag you. I noticed the text being pushed down the other day (on a desktop browser, Firefox on Windows 7) and it was a thread where a bunch of posts were already hidden, but I'd need regression hypnosis to recall what thread it was.
@editorkid I'll admit it's not 100% perfect. Sometimes we have trouble determining the size of the image when it's being posted, but my data suggests that it's pretty rare (less than 1% of the time). Without this feature in place I'd agree that lazy loading is a shitty experience.
Here's the thing, though… meh doesn't host any of the images we put in the forum; there is no upload feature; all images are hotlinked. That means meh has no control over the size of these images. Large images are downloaded at full size and scaled, not shrunken on the server. Thus there is no conservation of bandwidth. A lot of the larger, more image-heavy threads here were in the double-digits of megabytes. All being downloaded when you open the page. The 'this page is getting long' button did not help with that - everything still loaded, and was hidden w/ CSS (at least, I believe that's how it worked). For most mobile users, or anyone else with bandwidth caps, that sucks. Clicking a link to someone's response to one of my comments and not downloading the entire thread worth of images is a Very Good Thing.
It isn't saving Meh anything - it's actually saving you in terms of thread loading speed. Those threads that are very heavy in large images and gifs can take ages to load, and now at least you can read while the images load later on / as you get to them.
@Collin1000 Yep, if anything it cost them money, since slapping an <img> tag on the page is bog-standard, simple stuff whereas this required some actual dev work. Even if it's an off-the-shelf solution, there's testing and integration… you don't have to test an <img> tag! (Note to meh dev team: I know there was dev work involved in automagically interpreting image URLs and what-not, but y'all know what I mean. I hope.)
@brhfl I'll try to put together a post later that shows the user benefits with data, but it wasn't an easy implementation when you consider that we needed to figure out the dimensions of the image hosted on other sites in order to generate an appropriately sized gray box to prevent the page from jumping around.
@shawn I noticed that it does that, and I was very impressed. Very smart implementation. I definitely understand the benefits, as I'm pretty sure I had a data overage one month from hitting the forums hard on my phone before I did a little auditing and realized some pages were the equivalent of streaming a short video…
The solution is an option to disable lazy loading. I remember on dial-up, I would open multiple tabs so that while I was reading one tab, the other tabs would load in the background. In fact, I still do this when the wifi at a hotel is slow.
@shawn Ok, but first a clarification. My hyperbolic "never", actually means "not within the limits of my patience." Here's a screen capture: https://flic.kr/p/uW5KQh
@SSteve Ah, I see. The problem there is that @jont posted a 10MB animated GIF. Lazy loading or not it's going to take the same amount of time to download.
@shawn Haha, I was just checking on that when I saw you answered… @JonT seems notorious for posting some of the largest files - when I was looking at sizes of all the assets on various posts around here, his always seemed to float to the top of the list (all valuable GIFs, not complaining).
@shawn When I have more time I will find one that doesn't have the "this thread is too long" gray button (grading marathon - grades due 11 Tuesday) but this one, if you click on the gray button to open everything and scroll to the bottom as if you are replying it will jump around while the thread is loading - not the best example as it can do it on threads without the gray button but when there is a gray button and you immediately click on it and do a fast scroll to the bottom to the reply box it reliably does it for me. uverse internet, mac laptop, wireless connection, doesn't matter if I am the only one on the internet like right now. https://meh.com/forum/topics/zero-customer-service I realize that button there is for a reason, and if i'd wait for everything to load before I'd click it wouldn't be a problem. But it happens on some threads that don't have button too that are picture heavy and I presumed it was just the problem of the picture loading... annoying but not fatal LOL
I'll be honest, while I was waiting on your feedback I was in parallel working on a "load images lazily or eagerly" option for the forums.
But after watching your video and uncovering it's a 10MB GIF that's the issue here I don't think it makes any sense to go forward with the option. In this case, the lazy loading images feature is exactly what you need to allow you to keep using the forum while the image loads in the background rather than being blocked by a big download. And as @brhfl pointed out, we've heard some complaints about mobile data usage being too high on what's otherwise a very pleasant mobile experience.
@SSteve I think you're on to something there actually. We should detect large images and instead of displaying them inline provide a link that says "click here to view this 10MB image".
Just to throw a few numbers out there for fun, something like 'This is a new forum topic' runs 26MB in total (including a 5MB GIF courtesy of you-know-who). That's already pretty brutal, but what about something even more popular, chock-full of images… something like what happens when people start receiving their Fukus? 124MB. That's a lot of floppies.
@editorkid i only had a very vague recollection of zip disks, so i looked it up. found this funny excerpt from wikipedia: "In 2006, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 15th worst technology product of all time. Nonetheless, in 2007, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 23rd best technology product of all time despite its known problems."
@katylava Yeah, they were right both times. A necessary evil. My favorite was when Iomega knew they had lost the game and introduced a CD burner branded as 'Zip 650'.
Bonus points: it was big, round, and PURPLE! (cc @Barney)
@katylava For the time there wasn't anything like the Zip Drive- if you needed to move stuff, or have anything approaching portable storage, it was great- 100 MB vs 1.44 MB. It made moving from one computer to another in the 90s a lot easier. I luckily never encountered the "Click of Death", but that's almost entirely why it would be on the worst products of all time list.
@dashcloud and @brhfl covered them very nicely, but yeah, back in the days when hard drives were a status symbol and CD drives were marketed by their rotation speed (and CDs were the price of VHS tapes) these things were amazing. Now they're so under the radar you never even see ironic Lego recreations.
@dashcloud The death click was certainly the biggest issue, but there were others… Proprietary, awkward hookups (the externals largely used the 1284 parallel port, good luck with your printer on the passthrough…), pricy media… Of course, all that was just par for the course with computing in general, but even aside from the death click, they were certainly a necessary evil. While we're reminiscing about proprietary transitional storage formats, I loved my LS120 back in the day.
@brhfl I remember those! somehow I ended up in a class action lawsuit over lost data. It was the first time I received a check from out of nowhere. I love the storage cases for sewing supplies.
@SSteve I have the same problem when I am at home because my internet is complete crap. I would have better luck with dial-up. When I peruse meh at work, it's not problem at all.
It's so fucking user-hostile. It must be a huge money saver for sites somehow, but it's just a big wad of gooey saliva spat directly into users' faces.
@editorkid I don't know what any of this is referring to and I don't see any difference in how the site looks or acts so I'm guessing it must not be quite this bad?
@Bingo The reason I feel so strongly about it is that while it solves the small problem @brhfl mentions below, it ignores the bigger one, which is that you're reading the page but every time you land on a bit of text it has to load every single image above that text, so all of a sudden the text you're reading has jumped maybe 5 or 10 screens below where you've scrolled to. Consumerist is so bad at that that even their share buttons on a normal-sized browser window can quickly have you reading something you read long ago. And that's a problem a lot of us have been complaining about since this forum's earliest days, back when we thought maybe pagination was a great solution to this and almost every other design problem this forum software smacks in our faces.
I know we lusers make everything sound easy, but the Meh forum server should cache appropriately sized images for a day or two after the last activity in a thread. If that comes to maybe a thousand images at a meg apiece, hey, here's a 2GB thumb drive. Go crazy.
@editorkid when a new post is created that has an image, we go figure out what the image dimensions are going to be. That way we can generate an appropriately sized gray placeholder box. Images load in the background and replace the exact size gray box with the actual image when ready. Helps avoid the page jumping around as you've described.
@shawn I've been unlucky, I guess. I'm glad you get it and are apparently ahead of me. If I see any more examples of it here, I'll tag you. I noticed the text being pushed down the other day (on a desktop browser, Firefox on Windows 7) and it was a thread where a bunch of posts were already hidden, but I'd need regression hypnosis to recall what thread it was.
@editorkid I'll admit it's not 100% perfect. Sometimes we have trouble determining the size of the image when it's being posted, but my data suggests that it's pretty rare (less than 1% of the time). Without this feature in place I'd agree that lazy loading is a shitty experience.
Here's the thing, though… meh doesn't host any of the images we put in the forum; there is no upload feature; all images are hotlinked. That means meh has no control over the size of these images. Large images are downloaded at full size and scaled, not shrunken on the server. Thus there is no conservation of bandwidth. A lot of the larger, more image-heavy threads here were in the double-digits of megabytes. All being downloaded when you open the page. The 'this page is getting long' button did not help with that - everything still loaded, and was hidden w/ CSS (at least, I believe that's how it worked). For most mobile users, or anyone else with bandwidth caps, that sucks. Clicking a link to someone's response to one of my comments and not downloading the entire thread worth of images is a Very Good Thing.
@brhfl ^ THIS.
It isn't saving Meh anything - it's actually saving you in terms of thread loading speed. Those threads that are very heavy in large images and gifs can take ages to load, and now at least you can read while the images load later on / as you get to them.
@Collin1000 Yep, if anything it cost them money, since slapping an
<img>tag on the page is bog-standard, simple stuff whereas this required some actual dev work. Even if it's an off-the-shelf solution, there's testing and integration… you don't have to test an<img>tag!(Note to meh dev team: I know there was dev work involved in automagically interpreting image URLs and what-not, but y'all know what I mean. I hope.)
@brhfl I'll try to put together a post later that shows the user benefits with data, but it wasn't an easy implementation when you consider that we needed to figure out the dimensions of the image hosted on other sites in order to generate an appropriately sized gray box to prevent the page from jumping around.
@shawn I noticed that it does that, and I was very impressed. Very smart implementation. I definitely understand the benefits, as I'm pretty sure I had a data overage one month from hitting the forums hard on my phone before I did a little auditing and realized some pages were the equivalent of streaming a short video…
Whew! I thought it was just my computer. Nice to know I'm not alone.
I'm lazy and I fully support lazy image loading.
The solution is an option to disable lazy loading. I remember on dial-up, I would open multiple tabs so that while I was reading one tab, the other tabs would load in the background. In fact, I still do this when the wifi at a hotel is slow.
@shawn @Odi I would like this. There are a lot of images that I just never see. That didn't happen before the lazy loading.
@SSteve have an example I can look at?
@shawn Ok, but first a clarification. My hyperbolic "never", actually means "not within the limits of my patience." Here's a screen capture: https://flic.kr/p/uW5KQh
@SSteve Ah, I see. The problem there is that @jont posted a 10MB animated GIF. Lazy loading or not it's going to take the same amount of time to download.
@shawn Haha, I was just checking on that when I saw you answered… @JonT seems notorious for posting some of the largest files - when I was looking at sizes of all the assets on various posts around here, his always seemed to float to the top of the list (all valuable GIFs, not complaining).
@shawn Ok, so it's just my shitty internet.
@SSteve @shawn - I don't think the internet in this house is shitty and I have the same problem. While the photos load the text jumps around. Annoying.
@Kidsandliz have an example I can look into?
@shawn When I have more time I will find one that doesn't have the "this thread is too long" gray button (grading marathon - grades due 11 Tuesday) but this one, if you click on the gray button to open everything and scroll to the bottom as if you are replying it will jump around while the thread is loading - not the best example as it can do it on threads without the gray button but when there is a gray button and you immediately click on it and do a fast scroll to the bottom to the reply box it reliably does it for me. uverse internet, mac laptop, wireless connection, doesn't matter if I am the only one on the internet like right now. https://meh.com/forum/topics/zero-customer-service I realize that button there is for a reason, and if i'd wait for everything to load before I'd click it wouldn't be a problem. But it happens on some threads that don't have button too that are picture heavy and I presumed it was just the problem of the picture loading... annoying but not fatal LOL
It's not terrible. I've had a few pages and images lag to load, but it's a rare occurrence.
@SSteve Thanks for posting the screencast: https://flic.kr/p/uW5KQh
I'll be honest, while I was waiting on your feedback I was in parallel working on a "load images lazily or eagerly" option for the forums.
But after watching your video and uncovering it's a 10MB GIF that's the issue here I don't think it makes any sense to go forward with the option. In this case, the lazy loading images feature is exactly what you need to allow you to keep using the forum while the image loads in the background rather than being blocked by a big download. And as @brhfl pointed out, we've heard some complaints about mobile data usage being too high on what's otherwise a very pleasant mobile experience.
@shawn How about an option for "Eagerly (except for posts from @JonT)"?
@SSteve I think you're on to something there actually. We should detect large images and instead of displaying them inline provide a link that says "click here to view this 10MB image".
@shawn That might encourage Certain People to not post such huge images.
@shawn Can you auto-detect a mobile browser and enable lazy load on mobile?
@Collin1000 sure, but @ssteve's use case was a desktop browser
TL;DR -- all @jont 's fault??? ;)
Just to throw a few numbers out there for fun, something like 'This is a new forum topic' runs 26MB in total (including a 5MB GIF courtesy of you-know-who). That's already pretty brutal, but what about something even more popular, chock-full of images… something like what happens when people start receiving their Fukus? 124MB. That's a lot of floppies.
@brhfl Only 1 1/4 Zip disks, though.
@editorkid i only had a very vague recollection of zip disks, so i looked it up. found this funny excerpt from wikipedia: "In 2006, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 15th worst technology product of all time. Nonetheless, in 2007, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 23rd best technology product of all time despite its known problems."
@katylava Yeah, they were right both times. A necessary evil. My favorite was when Iomega knew they had lost the game and introduced a CD burner branded as 'Zip 650'.
Bonus points: it was big, round, and PURPLE! (cc @Barney)
@katylava For the time there wasn't anything like the Zip Drive- if you needed to move stuff, or have anything approaching portable storage, it was great- 100 MB vs 1.44 MB. It made moving from one computer to another in the 90s a lot easier. I luckily never encountered the "Click of Death", but that's almost entirely why it would be on the worst products of all time list.
@brhfl I haven't a clue as to what you are talking about, but I love purple.
@Barney
@brhfl Someone had good taste in color.
@dashcloud and @brhfl covered them very nicely, but yeah, back in the days when hard drives were a status symbol and CD drives were marketed by their rotation speed (and CDs were the price of VHS tapes) these things were amazing. Now they're so under the radar you never even see ironic Lego recreations.
@dashcloud The death click was certainly the biggest issue, but there were others… Proprietary, awkward hookups (the externals largely used the 1284 parallel port, good luck with your printer on the passthrough…), pricy media… Of course, all that was just par for the course with computing in general, but even aside from the death click, they were certainly a necessary evil. While we're reminiscing about proprietary transitional storage formats, I loved my LS120 back in the day.
@brhfl I remember those! somehow I ended up in a class action lawsuit over lost data. It was the first time I received a check from out of nowhere. I love the storage cases for sewing supplies.
Thanks to this thread, I'm pretty sure I'm one of the large gif posters. oops
@Thumperchick Just go buy yourself a t-shirt that says 'at least I'm not @JonT'