Per my post yesterday A note about WUWT fonts, readability, etc I’m going to try turning off the Google ads for a few hours. Those that have had font display issues, please advise if this cures the problem. Then I will know what to report to wordpress.com technical support. – Anthony
UPDATE: as of 4PM PST I’ve turned ads back on – those who reported problem cleared up when ads were off, please advise if the problem returns – Anthony
UPDATE2: 6PM PST OK Google ads are the problem, thanks to everyone who provided feedback. I’ve advised wordpress.com tech support. In the meantime the simple solutions you can do are:
- Run Internet Explorer in “compatibility mode”
- Use FireFox or Chrome, which are superior (and free) browsers
I chucked IE long ago, and I advise everyone to do the same.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Everything ok for me.
In recent days the posts were normal but the comments were in small fontsize and a pain to read.
Everything seems to be back to normal
Viewing the site on a HTC phone have had the screen blank except for the ad banner. May be a font display issue but affects images and all other content. Happens repeatedly when ad is scrolled over and prevents viewing parts of the page below ads. No problems on pc with FireFox. No problems without ads.
Hello Anthony
Everything looks fine, now – thanks!
I am running XP SP3 with IE8 – there was a problem before you did this but I got around it by clicking the Compatibility View button (next to the Refresh button on the IE toolbar), sometimes a few times……
Thank you for your wonderful blog site.
Had the problem (intermittently) with IE8 running on XP SP3 (my default – was fine with Chrome & Firefox) over past couple of days – now appears to be displaying perfectly…
Back to normal here.
u.k.(us) says:
March 11, 2012 at 1:19 pm
I’m having no font troubles on my old XP machine, one thing I have noticed of late is a slow/hanging when returning to WUWT after visiting a link from the sidebar.
IE, I’ll visit say JoNova from your sidebar, when I hit the back button to return to WUWT there can be a 15-45 second delay before I am back to the exact page position that I left on WUWT,
===========================================
During the above “hanging”, my browser has indicated it was waiting for “Googleads”.
As in my previous post – I experienced the problem in IE9 on Win 7 for about a day and a half. It is difficult to tell when you turned off the Google Ads (being in Australia EST) but without me doing anything the problem went away again about 36 hours ago. All good at the moment.
Hope this helps.
just a further comment, just went over to “the air vent’ and the font issue is back for my IE8…
Windows Vista, 4GB memory and all is back to normal now.
Alan
I never experienced the font problem, but had an issue with how comments displayed a few weeks back. Refreshing the page usually fixed that. I assumed it was a browser issue and the problem went away after a recent Firefox upgrade. WUWT is a very slow load here in Tas, presumably because of the ad tracking.
From Gail Combs on March 11, 2012 at 12:42 pm:
Anthony got rid of Recent Comments, finding it of limited value. I found it good for noting when comments were made to threads I thought long dead, found some spam that way, and otherwise found it useful, but I can live without it.
Recent Posts sometimes taking awhile to add in the new pieces is something I got used to, I’ve been “notified” of new posts by seeing them in Recent Comments before Recent Posts picked up on them. While that’s likely the fault of a wordpress script that’s scheduled rather than auto-run, sometimes the lag is so great I’m convinced the mods have to manually update the list.
Oh, Debian Linux (Lenny), Iceweasel (Debian Firefox variant), no problems, but AdBlock was keeping the Google ads away (loading problems, slow connection). When the experiment ends, I could unblock them and see if that causes problems.
WUWT is the only site where I don’t block the ads. Pay per click, yes?
All back to sanity. Thanx.
All OK here, checked on Windows 7 (4 Gb RAM) with
Firefox
IE9
Opera
Chrome
and on Android with
Opera
Dolphin HD
Anthony
If you had any income from Google clicks perhaps $xx /annum from regulars as myself, would partially compensate for the loss.
I’ve never had a problem with WUWT fonts or display that wasn’t solved by rebooting Firefox.
Please continue receiving revenues from Google Ads. You have them well placed and sometimes they are actually humorous in their juxtaposition with the articles. Makes me laugh.
I block everything possible from Google servers in my proxy server so I never see the ads nor any of the Google javascript, and didn’t see a font problem when others did. Looks like you found the culprit.
The ads being the culprit makes sense. I never had an issue at home (using Firefox with an ad blocker) but noticed font issues viewing the site at work* with IE and no ad blocker.
* @ur momisugly boss: in my lunch hour. Ahem.
Earlier in the day, up to about 2:00 PM EST, the problem’s was appearing and disappearing, but now all seems ok. I thought it had something to do with my refreshing the site and kept on doing it with varying results, but might have been indulging in Cargo Cult magic. My mini laptop’s still on XP, and I haven’t had a chance to test things on my PC at home.
The slow and hanging page loads are gone now.
FWIW – it has fixed a horribly annoying issue I was having reading (or trying to read) on my Android phone.
Very often, not 100% of the time, but well north of 50% as I was scrolling through the comments, the screen would refresh. The result would be a page as long as the original, but entirely blank, apart from that huge and mostly content free add that sits between the article and comments.
Refresh doesn’t help, and going back a page takes you out of the article completely, so you have to start again, and quite often, while scrolling back to try to pick up again, the same thing would happen.
Its not obvious if its the WordPress integration of the ads, of if its some Javascript crap that Google is using to try to gather usage info, but removing the ads removes the problem.
Philip
OK, over three hours now with ads turned off.
Thanks for the feedback, off topic or “never had a problem” comments have been deleted since I plan to use this to show WordPress.com tech support about the problem. Sorry to those whose comments I deleted, nothing personal just gathering data.
AS OF NOW, 4PM PST, I am turning ads back on to see if problem returns (again sorry).
Everything is back to normal.
Oddly enough, I have NO probs at all with fonts, if I looked at your site on Mozilla. However we have a very old Internet Explorer browser for our normal viewing (also extremely limited rural internet), and we’re a bit concerned about updating it… in any case, it seemed to flip-flop each time I came to your site.
Heh. And now that I posted that comment, the fonts have flipped again. No worries. It won’t stop people who want to Learn, from reading here.
Never detected the problem in either case.
I run a java script blocker (noScript) an ad blocker (adBlock Plus) and a custom host file that redirects all google page requests to 127.000.000.001