Not going to lie... I like this forum but man it is slowwwwwwwwww....

[turtleback]

Originally Posted by iacas P.S. Again, this is more about performance for me than ads. I want a snappy, fast site regardless of whether the user has ad block software, paid to become an ad-free user via the Supporter program, or is viewing the site with ads.

And as a user I agree with this from my side.  I have no intrinsic objection to ads.  Which is why I didn't have ad blocking software on my browser until just now.  If you can get people to give you money for having stuff on the screen more power to you.  I'm sure that makes it a better site, in the sense that it makes it worthwhile for you to put in the time and energy you do.  But the speed difference is really quite significant on my set-up, and while my hardware is certainly not high powered, it is less than a year old and pretty quick on the several other forums I frequent.  Clunky scrolling and slow response times are what I was experiencing before and now that doesn't happen.

I will be very interested to see what the package is that you will be offering for $39.  I'm all in favor of free enterprise, even when it isn't free to me.  The workman is worthy of his hire.

[iacas]

Originally Posted by MiniBlueDragon

Ah right so what you mean is that you think ABP is stopping the Javascript from running at all rather than nullifying it after it's run.

Yes. And that's why you're seeing performance gains. If the only thing AB did was stop an image from showing up (but still fetching it and doing all the work beforehand), then it wouldn't boost performance noticeably at all. I'm virtually certain that's how it works. My tests here confirm that - the ad scripts are never requested or retrieved.

The "page" content is there in the page delivered from the server. The browser then determines whether to fetch additional resources (i.e. the advertising javascript) based on the "page" content. AB can't pre-determine not to fetch portions of the page content.

That the ads go away after you've built the page is not proof of anything. It's just proof that AB will reload the page from a cache (or something) and not request (and will even hide the divs or something) ad scripts.

[MiniBlueDragon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by iacas

Yes. And that's why you're seeing performance gains. If the only thing AB did was stop an image from showing up (but still fetching it and doing all the work beforehand), then it wouldn't boost performance noticeably at all. I'm virtually certain that's how it works. My tests here confirm that - the ad scripts are never requested or retrieved.

The "page" content is there in the page delivered from the server. The browser then determines whether to fetch additional resources (i.e. the advertising javascript) based on the "page" content. AB can't pre-determine not to fetch portions of the page content.

That the ads go away after you've built the page is not proof of anything. It's just proof that AB will reload the page from a cache (or something) and not request (and will even hide the divs or something) ad scripts.

Right, for piece of mind I've spent a good while looking into the why's and wherefores of ABP and how it actually functions instead of us debating with no proof either way. :)

Quote: AdBlock Plus Internals FAQ

How does Adblock Plus block addresses?

The hard work here is actually done by Gecko, the engine on top of which Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications are built. It allows something called "content policies". A content policy is simply a JavaScript (or C++) object that gets called whenever the browser needs to load something. It can then look at the address that should be loaded and some other data and decide whether it should be allowed. There is a number of built-in content policies (when you define which sites shouldn't be allowed to load images in Firefox or SeaMonkey, you are actually configuring one of these built-in content policies) and any extension can register one. So all that Adblock Plus has to do is to register its content policy, other than that there is only application logic to decide which addresses to block and user interface code to allow configuration of filters.

For developers: to register a content policy you have to write an XPCOM component that should implement the nsIContentPolicy interface . Make sure to adjust the module's registerSelf method to register your component in the "content-policy" category (use the category manager for this). That's it, now your component's shouldLoad method will be called and you can decide whether the specific request should be accepted or not.

The reason ABP suddenly displays the page is not because it was cached as you thought or because the elements were hidden as I thought but because the policy for that page is switched off which then allows the code to run and display the ad.

To summarise: ABP gimps your advertising profit.

I've added an exception for TheSandTrap to ABP and will remember in future that it will affect other free sites.

[iacas]

Originally Posted by MiniBlueDragon

I've added an exception for TheSandTrap to ABP and will remember in future that it will affect other free sites.

Thanks. Within a day or two you'll be able to not see ads with or without AB, if you want. If you choose not to, and leave AB disabled for this site, I appreciate it. If you choose to buy into the Supporter program, which will allow you to disable ads, I and the other staff appreciate that as well.

[ControlJunkie]

Hopefully this will help some of you out that want things to load a little quicker. A few minutes ago, I installed IE9 (just released to web yesterday), and for whatever reason, everything is blazing fast. I was previously using Firefox for everything TST-related, but after installing, I wanted to see how IE 9 perforned on sites I'm on constantly.

Before, though I thought the site may have loaded a tad bit slower, it was never enough that I thought it was worth mentioning until this thread came up. For any of you running Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, I'd highly recommend grabbing it and at least trying it out. While I didnt really have a problem before, there is a very noticable, positive difference in how fast TST loads for me now with IE 9.

[turtleback]

Originally Posted by iacas

Thanks. Within a day or two you'll be able to not see ads with or without AB, if you want. If you choose not to, and leave AB disabled for this site, I appreciate it. If you choose to buy into the Supporter program, which will allow you to disable ads, I and the other staff appreciate that as well.

Erik, when this is announced officially where will that announcement appear?  I don't want to miss it.

Thanks

Rich

[iacas]

Originally Posted by turtleback

Erik, when this is announced officially where will that announcement appear?  I don't want to miss it.

You might be able to do it tomorrow. I'm gone for eight days starting tomorrow, though, so it'll be either tomorrow, or next Friday. :P Sorry about that.

[iacas]

Details to come, but if you want to sign up, the page will be here: http://thesandtrap.com/payment.php . There's a page there now and you can sign up if you'd like. If you'd like to wait for the details, by all means... wait for 'em. If you'd like to disable ads immediately, you can sign up right away.

[Williamevanl]

I dont want to sign up for anything but I was about to make this same post. I'm at work and I've never been on a slow site before. I can go to websites with crazy amounts of javascript, movies, animations galore and they load instantly but for whatever reason this site is dreadfully slow. I can't even scroll up and down the page quickly and when go to quickly close or open the window it will sometimes just lag forever. I can actually type faster than this cursor can keep up with me, thats crazy!

[iacas]

Originally Posted by Williamevanl

I dont want to sign up for anything but I was about to make this same post. I'm at work and I've never been on a slow site before. I can go to websites with crazy amounts of javascript, movies, animations galore and they load instantly but for whatever reason this site is dreadfully slow. I can't even scroll up and down the page quickly and when go to quickly close or open the window it will sometimes just lag forever. I can actually type faster than this cursor can keep up with me, thats crazy!

Is your computer slow? What are your results using a different browser - Chrome, perhaps, or Safari? It's tough for me to know what you're all seeing. My Internet connection is reasonably fast and my computer keeps up pretty well. ;-)

BTW, the Supporter Program is available here now: http://thesandtrap.com/wiki/the-sand-trap-supporter-programs .

[Williamevanl]

It took me 45 seconds to load the website and then to click into this thread. (compared to say 4 seconds to do the same on ****wrx.com)  My computer is a Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00 Ghz, 3.46 GB of RAM. I'm on a T1 line and I work in an I.T department so our connections are about as fast as they come. (My desktop obviously not brand new though)

I also got this:

Pinging thesandtrap.com 67.228.167.131 with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 67.228.167.131: Packets: Sent = 4, recieved = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

and it just took about 40 seconds following this loading before I could edit it, anyway I also use firefox and chrome, about the same from what I can tell.

[iacas]

Originally Posted by Williamevanl

I also got this:

Pinging thesandtrap.com 67.228.167.131 with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 67.228.167.131: Packets: Sent = 4, recieved = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

Then that may be a different matter altogether - you seem to be experiencing network issues.

 PING thesandtrap.com (67.228.167.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=84.482 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=88.589 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=91.585 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=78.729 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=85.412 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=5 ttl=50 time=82.544 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=6 ttl=50 time=106.085 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=7 ttl=50 time=71.555 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=8 ttl=50 time=126.046 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=9 ttl=50 time=93.521 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=10 ttl=50 time=79.128 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=11 ttl=50 time=83.359 ms
64 bytes from 67.228.167.131: icmp_seq=12 ttl=50 time=79.709 ms
^C
--- thesandtrap.com ping statistics ---
13 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 71.555/88.519/126.046/13.556 ms

What's a traceroute look like?

   traceroute to thesandtrap.com (67.228.167.131), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  2.446 ms  1.440 ms  1.196 ms
 2  cpe-123-456-789-0.neo.res.rr.com (174.100.224.1)  67.547 ms  90.207 ms  71.866 ms
 3  gig2-3.mlckpa1-ybr2.neo.rr.com (24.164.115.5)  85.508 ms  61.210 ms  80.841 ms
 4  srp1-1.hbckpa1-ybr2.neo.rr.com (24.164.99.129)  78.977 ms  73.502 ms  85.964 ms
 5  gig2-1.ncntoh1-swt402.neo.rr.com (24.164.102.246)  59.934 ms  97.183 ms  29.745 ms
 6  gig13-0-0.ncntoh1-rtr2.neo.rr.com (24.164.104.93)  44.164 ms  101.985 ms  83.347 ms
 7  tge1-0-1.clevoh1-rtr0.mwrtn.rr.com (65.25.137.173)  105.892 ms  105.030 ms  103.783 ms
 8  ae-3-0.cr0.dca20.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.70)  114.714 ms  102.210 ms  110.136 ms
 9  ae-1-0.pr0.dca10.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.165)  110.200 ms  111.757 ms  111.617 ms
10  te1-2.bbr01.eq01.wdc01.networklayer.com (66.109.9.218)  112.603 ms  112.026 ms  107.937 ms
11  po99.bbr01.eq01.wdc02.networklayer.com (173.192.18.194)  103.573 ms  110.357 ms  106.498 ms
12  po3.bbr02.tl01.atl01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.153)  130.687 ms  119.408 ms  111.109 ms
13  po6.dar02.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.213)  139.242 ms  132.498 ms  84.943 ms
14  po2.fcr04.sr05.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.218)  85.398 ms  166.694 ms  126.164 ms
15  67.228.167.131-static.reverse.softlayer.com (67.228.167.131)  126.473 ms  129.596 ms  146.131 ms
  

Any broken or stalled hops?