Choice Banners in Posts

This PC is a circa 2010 I7-860 with a GTS250 graphics card. Another from 2009 has an i7-865 with an HD4890 card, and another is a 2013 i7-3517U notebook with Intel graphics, all with the same issue.

I previously made a remark about the irony of the Junk Mail banner atop a Choice staff post about junk mail. The banner shows for a moment every time the thread is opened, and then the thread is positioned. The banner is ‘yuge’!

Now there is a ‘yuge’ banner in the Going Our Own Way. The 4 browsers I checked each render and display the graphic and then position the thread. Hardware acceleration is enabled where available. Perhaps new systems with more power do not display the ‘pause that irritates’?

If pretty header graphics are in vogue at Choice, please make them small and consider the impact on those of us who revisit threads and are presented with the banner, time after time after time. Or is this just me?

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We don’t appear to be having the problems you are experiencing.

We use Samsung tablet and chrome on desktop. This is how it looks on the tablet:

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I’m not seeing it either, with a 3yo i7 Win 10 laptop and Firefox.

What I see every time I click on either thread is the above banner for a moment, and then it immediately positions to the last post I read. Firefox, Edge, Opera, all the same. Win 10 X64 Pro.

Hi @PhilT, apologies for any frustration caused. Sounds like a load time issue or it could be a possible bug. We keep the images to 40kb or less to try to keep everything loading quickly, but maybe there is something our developers can do to assist. I’ll flag it as an issue with them.

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If nobody else is seeing this it could be something I have installed since I keep the software on the 3 fairly similar, but it does happen on all 3 PCs.

I click on (eg) Going our own way. The green banner displays for a second or two, and then it positions to the last text I read, every time.

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No worries, I can understand that would be annoying. I’ll have to request some testing, so please bear with us.

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I misunderstood what you were saying in your initial post. I do see that banner and then it jumps to wherever I have read to in the thread. It’s only in this thread that I see a huge banner though, and although it is big in area, it is only 39.76 kB (40,715 bytes), so doesn’t noticeably slow the loading process … even on nbn satellite, which is always slow when there are lots of separate items to load.

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It is not so much a performance issue as an irritation/nuisance to see the banner for that second, every time.

The only two threads that have one of which I am aware are those I referenced above. My hope is to stop the proliferation.

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Speaking of irritations, I’d like to ban the little line going around and around in a circle (waiting/buffering or whatever), which appears before and lasts longer than the banner, but I doubt that can be fixed, I’ll just have to :persevere: !

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@PhilT The image is part of any post that goes into the ‘Featured’ category, and there are a few other stylistic changes as well. The posts in this category seem to attract good engagement, but that’s not to say they can’t be changed, improved or removed.

@gordon, it’s another load time issue. Ideally if load times are quick enough the buffering wheel won’t display for long, but other than trying to improve this factor, there’s probably not much we can do.

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I suspect it may also or mainly be related to the very long ping times on nbn satellite - generally around 650ms.

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it all renders quickly and painlessly on my Raspberry Pi 3 and an old old laptop I use … while the image renders large, filesize is small … strange …

That is indeed the case but I do not enjoy having to look at it every time, before the thread moves on to the ‘last’ post.

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PNG format and not very many colours helps with that, the same as with GIF format.

‘strange’ referred to the perceived performance issues wrt mention of graphics cards/etc - not that the image was small :slight_smile: that was just an observation re transfer time/etc ie that size wasn’t the issue. Case in point, I remember a website I left open that displayed a dozen or so images at a very small size, turned out each was a few MB and the rendering js they implemented at the browser cost that on each frame switch (site had a slideshow banner kinda thing). I had inadvertently left this browser tab open for a number of days and it took some netflow analysis to work out the primary suspects (kids) weren’t to blame … luckily at the time I was running a netflow capable router and had flow export history going back months “just in case” :slight_smile:

Are you pining for the old hour glass? :smiley:

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:laughing: no, I just wish buffering wasn’t an issue at all!

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