Automatic page refresh gone?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

Before yesterday's maintenance, whenever I went from page to page, they refreshed automatically. The home page, Latest, thread pages, etc.

It no longer does this. I have to remember to press F5 all the time now. I can adjust, but the old way was very very handy.

Have others observed this?
Was this intentional, as part of the maintenance?

[EarlG]

1. To clarify:

The way it should work is that when you switch from one page to another -- say from a thread to the Latest page -- you should see the most up-to-date version of the page that you went to.

If that is not happening for you -- if you are having to manually reload the destination page before it will show up-to-date information -- then that sounds like a problem.

I'm not experiencing this personally, and I've not had any other reports of this behavior, but if it started happening after we did the code update on Thursday/Friday then it is probably related.

I'll add this to the shortlist of items we need to take a look at to make sure everything is working as it should. Thanks for the report.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. You're welcome. Thank you EarlG and Elad

Up to date FireFox browser on Windows 11.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Sorry, I was not precise on one point: It is when I use the browser back arrow or ALT-back_arrow.

Clicking on the Latest tab always gets me the current Latest page but if I visit a thread from there and go back to Latest then it doesn't refresh automatically.

Sorry for the bother. I should have been more precise in my original post.

[EarlG]

4. Hmm

Now you've updated with this information, I'm not sure what's going on here. I believe that the action you're reporting as an error is actually the expected behavior.

If I go to the Latest page, then open a thread, then use the back button in my browser to return to the Latest page, I get the previous version of the Latest page -- it doesn't update until I manually click the refresh button. But as far as I know, that's the way it's always worked, and that's the way it's supposed to work.

So now I'm slightly confounded because I never really thought about this until you brought it up... but I'm pretty sure that for me, hitting back in my browser never auto-refreshes the page I'm going back to. Maybe other folks can weigh in with how it works for them?

[progree]

5. Before the updates, when I was on the Home page and clicked the lit-up "My Subs" tab

and then clicked the browser's back arrow button, I'd return to the Home Page and the "My Subs" tab would no longer be lit up.

After the update, it's the same except when I back arrow to the Home Page, the "My Subs" tab is still lit. Hitting refresh unlights the tab. I've seen this behavior many times, 100% of the time.

It's not just specific to the Home Page, I'm just using that as an example. Substitute "Home Page" with "any page except the Subscriptions page" and what I wrote above behaves the same way as described above for the Home Page example

(Edge on a Windows 10 desktop PC, logged in star member)

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. Yes, expected behaviour on websites, but DU was better than others. It enabled me to maintain a stack more easily.

It is common, customary and expected on websites like fora that going back to a thread index page or forum index page which changes as people post, it is necessary to refresh (F5) to get the current state. I think most people just click forward, making heavy use of the tabs without maintaining a stack of DU pages, but I like to do so with consequent heavy use of the go-back function.

DU4 is (was) better. If I went from the Home page to the General Discussion index page to a thread and saw the Posts tab light up and go to My Posts and read post from there, ... I could go back (Alt left-arrow) to My Posts and it would be updated with any new posts and back to the first thread and it would be updated with new posts and back to the GD index page and it would have new replies listed at the top without having to refresh and go back to the Home page which would be automatically up-to-date with tallies of recommendations increased and order changed and new blurbs about Latest Breaking News, etc., all automatically without having to pause to find the F5 key and reload.

It meant that DU was one of the most fun and addicting sites on the web. The experience was very fluid and fast and seamless without the interruption to move the eyes and find the F5 key, press it and look back up at the screen. Also making it fast and fluid was that the My Posts and Subs tabs were dependable and automatic. If they were on, something had changed. Now I have to check or remember I forgot to F5 or not.

There are a few sites that provide similar fluidity, for example stock websites like the one I use: MarketWatch https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/spx where if I go to another tab or another page and go back, the ticker is updated and every so often the graph is too. The mechanism there is probably different, more server event driven (ticker updates drive the page) because it ticks even if I haven't moved from the page. DU never did and does not need to tick in the same way, though it would be interesting if it did.

There was one downside of the sleek old way at DU. If I wrote a post, I would have to be careful not to click a DU tab (Latest, Greatest, My Posts, etc.) because then I'd lose the post-in-progress because the page would refresh to a blank Reply text page. But if I used Preview, the Preview page would preserve the text.

Another side effect I'm sure is closely related is that if I was at a post of mine and clicked Edit, clicked Update, read the updated thread page, then went back to the edit page with the latest revision in the text area, I could edit it a second time and Update it and it would post fine. But now when I hit the Update the second time the duplicate checker warning appears. It is a very minor inconvenience that I only trigger rarely.

For DU I'm sure there is some HTTP request / response / event when a person returns to a page and that in the past you and Elad deployed it so effectively even if . I haven't looked at web http / javascript / CSS in a couple of years and I never used such an event myself. I don't know if cached pages get a signal or if the browser signals the server It is just the kind of thing that could have gotten dropped inadvertently in an update or possibly something a certain http server software configuration might take care of site wide, maybe as small as flipping a bit on an XML tag.

I can live with or without the changes to Reply text behaviour or update behaviour, but I really do love the svelte and lithe automatic update feature. An automatic tick or update for when pages are staying exposed would be quite a feature and would encourage people to keep DU open on the Home page or the Latest page or the GD index page. Also a Latest Posts page (counterpart to the existing Latest thread page) with little blurbs would be awesome, tick or no tick.

Anyway, it's still a great site even if it is not quite as aerodynamic as it was a week or two ago.

[EarlG]

7. Interesting

After we switched to DU4 there were quite a few complaints about how the software change had caused problems with the way people posted.

On DU3, if you were in the middle of a post and you went to a different URL in the same tab to research something, when you clicked "back" then everything you'd written would still be there.

But on DU4 that changed -- when you clicked "back" the text would be gone. It was a pretty big annoyance for some people, but I didn't really have a good handle on why it was happening. Until the changes last week, we were much more integrated into our ad provider's system, so I suspect that the behavior may have been caused by code that they were injecting. Because it wasn't our code, it was a lot more difficult to get a handle on what was going on.

This latest update seems to have resolved that problem, because we've mostly deintegrated from that previous setup -- but unfortunately it's now causing a problem for you, because you prefer the way that it worked previously (ie. page reload when hitting "back" ).

So this is a bit of a tough one, because whatever it was that changed last week fixed an issue that was bothering some people, but has now caused an issue for you. Given that the way it's working now is, generally speaking, the way browsers should work, I'm inclined to leave it as is.

That said, it may be possible for us to include a meta-tag on the Latest page which will prevent caching of that page only -- I'm not sure this is something we should implement site-wide though because that could result in un-fixing the other problem. It would also mean that only the Latest page would reload upon clicking "back." I can look into it, but in the meantime, I wonder if there is a Firefox extension out there that might recreate the behavior you're looking for?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Thanks. Putting a meta tag on the Lastest, Home, Subs, My Posts, and the two main indexes (GD,LBN) would go a long way

That way posts being composed would be preserved as now and that is good.

Those six pages are the key ones for refresh because we always refresh when going back to them. Putting a tag on just those six should be easy and have no adverse affects. Or just do not put it on the Post a reply and Edit pages, since those are easily identifiable, and use it on most or all other pages. (Wouldn't need it on Journal, Profile, or info pages.) If a meta-tag to prevent caching can be put on one or six pages it could be put on most. If it is on most pages, like thread and post reading pages, that would help. Currently, now, if I post on a thread, I see it on the page that comes up, but then when I go back through the Post Reply page and back to the thread page where I decided to post from my post is not there and I have to F5.

Also a meta-tag on most pages would mean that DU tabs would be dependable when yellow or blue instead of being flaky depending on F5.

I hadn't looked for an extension, good idea, so I just took a quick look. It seems there are some for tabs but page refresh seems to be broad spectrum.

I don't know if you really want people to put refreshers on DU pages and browser tabs every ten seconds. People would leave it running all the time which is a useless load on the server. People who use the back button on the site might go back to pages say 200 times a day and that's all the refreshes they need. Auto page refresh every 10 seconds would be a 2,880 times in an 8 hour day on multiple pages. It also would not be effective. When I go back, I have to (want to) hit F5 within less than a second. The temptation would be then to put refresh on those six or more pages or site-wide every second to avoid any delay. Not good.

Another problem with auto-refresh extensions means that refreshes would disturb reading. If I'm reading a thread and in the middle of consuming a good post with a few paragraphs and the page updated with a new post higher up, I get interrupted and have to find my place, and it might necessitate using mouse or buttons. With meta-tags it only refreshes when we want it, when we use the back key / button.

I think selective use of meta-tags would maintain or increase engagement.

Whatever you decide, always a great site.

[EarlG]

9. I would not recommend an auto-refresher extension for the reasons you state

I wondered if there might be one which provided a simple "reload on back" function, but yeah, like you, the ones I was finding seemed to be focused on auto-refreshing tabs after a certain period of time, which is not what we're looking to achieve here.

We can potentially consider the meta-tag solution on a number of pages. There may be a legitimate technical reason that we can't do it, but I can look into it.