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I can't use The Huddle like this


rajncajn

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I have had zero problems with the site speed. And if you are having trouble on both the boards and the site, realize that those are two separate servers/pipes that are in different parts of the country. We do everything possible to make the site as fast as possible and are even rated as extremely fast.

 

I would suspect it does have much to do with corporate firewalls, etc.

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I've picked up several trojans here lately also. Has to be since I don't go to any other sites.

 

 

In no way should you ever get any viruses here. Never, never, never.

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Guest Cherni

sigh...

 

It's not as simple as just being behind a corporate firewall.

 

I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon with one of our IT guys, upgrading and installing some new softwares on my computer. I showed him how long it takes for the home page and the message boards to load. We're not talking a lag time of 5-10 seconds here, we're talking over 30 seconds, and most times up to a minute for each and every page to load.

 

He told me, yep, that's corporate blocking the ads on that site. It's not even in our building but over at the corporate office that its taking place. He checked this morning to see if he could find out what ad servers were on that banned list, and he did find out adcorps was on that list.

 

So maybe those who are not having trouble at work and are behind corporate firewalls, their company doesn't work off that same list. I don't know.

 

But bottom line, I think it's obvious it is this particular ad/banner company that many our our workplaces IT depts have deemed undesirable. It started the same afternoon the huddle switched server companies. It only happens to us at work, not at home. And one of my IT guys confirm that's what it is. :D

 

 

Billy if you're corporate office deemed the company undesirable they would block the site, they wouldn't slow it down as that wouldn't really make sense. Either they allow or they don't, they don't cut down on bandwidth for specific sites (for the most part). Are the banners popping up when you finally get to the site?

 

I'm the Network Admin at my company and have made no changes to any of our firewalls, routers. There are no corporate filters working at our headquarters, which is my office. At work I'm painfully slow but at home I'm not. I've noticed that I get the same response time when I try pinging the forums by DNS name as well as IP. The homepage responds quicker by a few MS, but not much. I get the same response time from home and work so it's not a problem with the pipe.

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I've noticed that I get the same response time when I try pinging the forums by DNS name as well as IP. The homepage responds quicker by a few MS, but not much. I get the same response time from home and work so it's not a problem with the pipe.

 

 

From this Huddle message board page's source:

 

<!--AdRevolver code begin: 728 x 90--><script language=JavaScript type=text/javascript><!--var rnd = Math.round(Math.random() * 10000000);document.writeln('<SCR'+'IPT language=JavaScript type=text/javascript src="http://ads.adcorps.com:8888/adrevolver/banner?js&place=100&cpy='+rnd+'">');document.writeln('</SC'+'RIPT>');//--></SCRIPT><NOSCRIPT><IFRAME src="http://ads.adcorps.com:8888/adrevolver/banner?place=100&cpy=1" width=728 height=90 scrolling=no allowtransparency=true frameborder=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0><A href="http://ads.adcorps.com:8888/adrevolver/href?place=100&rnd=1000" target="_blank"><IMG src="http://ads.adcorps.com:8888/adrevolver/banner?img&place=100&rnd=1000" width=728 height=90 border=0 alt="AdRevolver" ismap></A></IFRAME></NOSCRIPT><!--AdRevolver code end-->

 

 

There is frames, scripts, or images from adcorps.com loading whenever you load a mb page, too. It's not just the huddle server sending info. Can you ping that, or try to load just that portion of the page from work and see if that is your delay?

Edited by AtomicCEO
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Are the banners popping up when you finally get to the site?

 

 

 

 

 

Nope, that's the deal, when the page does finally load, there are no banners what so ever at the top. Zero, nothin!

 

 

We can all debate what the problem actually is....I can only go by what the smarter then me tech guys tell me.

 

Bottom line, this started shortly after the huddle changed their ad server on Monday afternoon, so now I, and some other long time huddlers, no longer feel we can spend our day time hours here at the huddle. It's one thing to have our IT programs block the huddle. It's another thing, in my mind, when the huddle chooses to use ads that cause the huddle to be a pain to use.

 

At the same time, it appears they have chosen to use an ad company that a lot of companies choose to block, so those ads don't show up in the first place. So in the case that all of us that are having a problem...we don't even see the freakin' ads they feel we should be seeing so they make money.

 

Their choice to make this move with the ads at the top. Up until this week I have had zero problems with the ads they have added. Now it's a major pain, especially when you have 4 league forums I need to keep tabs on along with the regular forums.

 

I've never been upset with the changes the huddle has made over the years, I understand their need to make some profit off of this. But when I can't use it...I'm going to have to make a choice in the future, if I want to pay for something I can't use more then half the time I used to.

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I just clued in ... when I visit the Huddle at work the ad pages do not show up. When I visit the ad pages at home they do.

 

That means my problem is that the corporate firewall is kicking in every time I paint a page and is removing the ad banner.

 

I guess I'm going to be hanging at FFToday or some other FF website during the daylight hours.

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The speed of the site actually isn't the thing. When I load a page & I watch the status bar it jets to about half way then hangs up for about 30-40 seconds then the window pops in. My guess is when the adcorps stuff starts hitting the server it hangs up the page and I as well do not see any of the ads while I'm surfing at work. However I do when I am surfing other sites & I did before the change. I don't think the problem is a bandwidth problem, I think the lag is whatever time it takes the corporate filters to block or remove the adcorp banners. I'm like Billay, if it weren't for my league forums here I doubt I'd spend any time on the boards during the day now. As it is I've resorted to opening multiple tabs just to check up on things which in turn gives me very little time to post anything.

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What Atomic is showing in his post is that the web page first attempts to run a script which will inject a random banner ad into the page. In the event that javascript is disabled or blocked, it will instead try to load an iframe (an embedded web page).

 

What is most likely happening here is that the corporate sites are blocking the ad serving companies by ip address or name or both. The script to inject the banner probably fails almost immediately because the source javascript file can not be loaded. If that was all it did, the rest of the page would finish loading and nobody would notice. The problem comes from the fact that it falls back on an iframe which requires the browser to attempt to load the ad page from adcorps. Since this is still blocked by the firewall, you have to wait for the http request to time out before the rest of the page will load.

 

This results because the html in the web page is read line by line and used to build the entire document structure before it is presented to you. Normally, this happens in a fraction of a second, but when one of the elements that makes up the page hangs up, in this case the IFRAME, it delays the contruction of the document. Since it is not complete yet, it can not be presented to you.

 

The Huddle could potententially resolve this by only attempting to inject the banner using javascript and lose the iframe......

Edited by smithkt
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Guest Cherni

The corporate firewall idea is out the window. I'm in NYC and having trouble accessing the site. I used a Terminal Services connection to take over a PC in my LA office and have ZERO trouble accessing the site and the forums.

 

Could this be ISP related? I think that might be the case.

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What Atomic is showing in his post is that the web page first attempts to run a script which will inject a random banner ad into the page. In the event that javascript is disabled or blocked, it will instead try to load an iframe (an embedded web page).

 

What is most likely happening here is that the corporate sites are blocking the ad serving companies by ip address or name or both. The script to inject the banner probably fails almost immediately because the source javascript file can not be loaded. If that was all it did, the rest of the page would finish loading and nobody would notice. The problem comes from the fact that it falls back on an iframe which requires the browser to attempt to load the ad page from adcorps. Since this is still blocked by the firewall, you have to wait for the http request to time out before the rest of the page will load.

 

This results because the html in the web page is read line by line and used to build the entire document structure before it is presented to you. Normally, this happens in a fraction of a second, but when one of the elements that makes up the page hangs up, in this case the IFRAME, it delays the contruction of the document. Since it is not complete yet, it can not be presented to you.

 

The Huddle could potententially resolve this by only attempting to inject the banner using javascript and lose the iframe......

 

 

That's basically what I was trying to point out, but I didn't have the know-how to describe it coherently.

 

But, I did want to put it out there since WW is claiming There is no outside code being displayed on the site... which is not true. We are loading some html or a frame from another site with every page load, and theHuddle does not have strict control over it's content. It only has whatever guarantee adcorps gives them.

 

And, judging by the experience with bigad, I'd say guarantees from companies like that are not worth the pixels they are printed on.

Edited by AtomicCEO
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The corporate firewall idea is out the window. I'm in NYC and having trouble accessing the site. I used a Terminal Services connection to take over a PC in my LA office and have ZERO trouble accessing the site and the forums.

 

Could this be ISP related? I think that might be the case.

 

 

Could be, but since I am not having the problem, I can't begin to try and troublshoot it.

 

You should try a traceroute to ads.adcorps.com from both locations. I'm betting one of them never reaches the destination.

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Do your corporate permissions allow you to change your hosts file? I'm guessing probably not... but I found this attempt at a fix on the web:

 

Go to the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc folder. (Your system folder may vary depending on the version of windows).

Open the file called "hosts" in notepad. It should just be "hosts" with no extension.

At the bottom of the file, add this following line:

127.0.0.1  ads.adcorps.com

Save the file, and reboot the system.

 

Now, whenever you load a Huddle page, when it goes to find any content from ads.adcorps.com, it will look on your local computer for it (127.0.0.1 is an alias for "this computer"), and immediately come up with nothing instead of going out to your corporate DNS server over the network, and trying to resolve the IP and load the content. This should theoretically avoid the firewall altogether since it is never leaving your computer.

 

Theoretically it should time out in milliseconds as opposed to minutes. On my PC, I get nothing where the ads would be and it took no time at all to load the page.

Edited by AtomicCEO
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Guest Cherni

Could be, but since I am not having the problem, I can't begin to try and troublshoot it.

 

You should try a traceroute to ads.adcorps.com from both locations. I'm betting one of them never reaches the destination.

 

Tracert results from the PC that's working:

 

A total of 16 hops with a response time no greater than 43 MS.

 

 

From the problematic PC:

 

17 hops, with much slower response time, 76, 53, 53 66, 63.

 

 

I think we're getting somewhere.

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Nope, that's the deal, when the page does finally load, there are no banners what so ever at the top. Zero, nothin!

We can all debate what the problem actually is....I can only go by what the smarter then me tech guys tell me.

 

Bottom line, this started shortly after the huddle changed their ad server on Monday afternoon, so now I, and some other long time huddlers, no longer feel we can spend our day time hours here at the huddle. It's one thing to have our IT programs block the huddle. It's another thing, in my mind, when the huddle chooses to use ads that cause the huddle to be a pain to use.

 

At the same time, it appears they have chosen to use an ad company that a lot of companies choose to block, so those ads don't show up in the first place. So in the case that all of us that are having a problem...we don't even see the freakin' ads they feel we should be seeing so they make money.

 

Their choice to make this move with the ads at the top. Up until this week I have had zero problems with the ads they have added. Now it's a major pain, especially when you have 4 league forums I need to keep tabs on along with the regular forums.

 

I've never been upset with the changes the huddle has made over the years, I understand their need to make some profit off of this. But when I can't use it...I'm going to have to make a choice in the future, if I want to pay for something I can't use more then half the time I used to.

 

 

I agree! By the way it has taken over a minute to reply to a post it used to take no more than 5 seconds.

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But, I did want to put it out there since WW is claiming There is no outside code being displayed on the site... which is not true.

 

You are mixing topics. My comment that you say is false is from a thread discussing popups. That is a completely seperate issue from the one in this topic and I don't appreciate you taking my comments out of context and implying that I am being untruthful.

 

My statement that you have tried to use in this context is 100% true. Not a single piece of code is being served at The Huddle that The Huddle doesn't want served. Since the ad serving code is code we have purposely installed and want here, it is not "outside" code. It is in-house.

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Guest Cherni

Do your corporate permissions allow you to change your hosts file? I'm guessing probably not... but I found this attempt at a fix on the web:

 

Go to the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc folder. (Your system folder may vary depending on the version of windows).

Open the file called "hosts" in notepad. It should just be "hosts" with no extension.

At the bottom of the file, add this following line:

127.0.0.1  ads.adcorps.com

Save the file, and reboot the system.

 

Now, whenever you load a Huddle page, when it goes to find any content from ads.adcorps.com, it will look on your local computer for it (127.0.0.1 is an alias for "this computer"), and immediately come up with nothing instead of going out to your corporate DNS server over the network, and trying to resolve the IP and load the content. This should theoretically avoid the firewall altogether since it is never leaving your computer.

 

Theoretically it should time out in milliseconds as opposed to minutes. On my PC, I get nothing where the ads would be and it took no time at all to load the page.

 

No dice on that. I've tried on 2 different pc's. :D

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You are mixing topics. My comment that you say is false is from a thread discussing popups. That is a completely seperate issue from the one in this topic and I don't appreciate you taking my comments out of context and implying that I am being untruthful.

 

My statement that you have tried to use in this context is 100% true. Not a single piece of code is being served at The Huddle that The Huddle doesn't want served. Since the ad serving code is code we have purposely installed and want here, it is not "outside" code. It is in-house.

 

I wasn't accusing you of trying to mislead us, or intentionally being deceitful. Sorry if it seemed that way.

 

But, I misunderstood your statement, so I thought it could use some clarification. There actually is code from adcorps being run when you load a huddle page. To me, that is "outside" code because it doesn't come directly from you. And, although you approved it, you don't necessarily know everything that is coming from them because it isn't from your server. You approved bigads code as well, but people were still getting popups.

 

I would never suggest the Huddle was intentionally doing anything bad. I'm just trying to help find a solution for the problem many customers are experiencing. Sorry if it seemed like a dig on you.

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The Huddle could potententially resolve this by only attempting to inject the banner using javascript and lose the iframe......

 

Just to follow up on this statement I made earlier..... This won't help. I tried an experiment adding this code from Atomic to a web page I am hosting away from my corporate site. I then added a rule to my corporate firewall blocking the ads.adcorps.com site. I saw the delay. I took out the iframe only leaving in the script and still see the delay. I was under the impression that trying to load an external javascript file would timeout more quickly than a standard http request. I was mistaken.

Edited by smithkt
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Really? I just tried it on my computer and it works perfectly. I didn't even have to reboot.

 

 

Like I said though... I'm no expert. Are there some kind of permissions and policies that can limit your access to the hosts file? Is it possible that his system isn't even using that hosts file?

 

Which has priority, the hosts file or a DNS cache? Maybe he needs to flush that?

 

I'm just guessing now though.

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