OK, looks like it is working again now. Now I need to locate what I attempted to post before on railroad litigation if I can find it again. 
Evidently I was one of the lucky “unaffected” ones, as I was able ton post yesterday, albeit none of the tools just above the text entry block would appear.
I wish they had mentioned something about what the malfunction was, because perhaps just coincidently a totally unrelated forum that I participate regularly in, yesterday would not allow me to log in…and I kept getting this message “waiting on code.jquery.com”… And just due to the timing and similarity of problems I wondered if they could somehow be related.
code.jquery.com has to do with verifying 3rd party sites, likely (but I admit I’m just guessing) an adserver of some sorts.
Unfortunatly this other forum can never admit fault, their default troubleshooting instruction is always to “dump all your cookies and see if that helps”, leaving me again to suspect the 3rd party sites had updated their snooperware, and obsolete (for their purposes) cookies were mucking up the traffic flow.
Was anybody else here who was having a problem experiencing the “waiting for code.jquery.com” message?
Judging by how few posts, I would guess the problem affected many members.
Good point,…I wonder if any of them noticed a problem with code.jquery.com?
I didn’t get that message, but I could not log onto my forum account until a short while ago.
It’s amazing how many non-online things I can accomplish when I can’t login.
The following is likely unrelated to the problem here yesterday, but I offer it merely to illustrate a point.
I can no longer log on to my Amazon account from any computer that does not have their authentication “cookie” already set in my system.
For instance, if I were to go to my public library and try to log on to amazon, despite having the correct user name and password, their system would note the absence of the required cookie, and require me to go through a two step authentication process where they would send me a temporary code to my registered e-mail account.
Once I employed their temp code I would be good to go.
Likewise If I delete all cookies on my home machine, I’ll get put through the same process…just one time until the new cookie is set in place.
I mention this because you often see people claim that cookies are just used to perform benign tracking and other services of that nature, and that they cannot prevent you from logging in. Obviously they can be used for a great deal more than that, as my Amazon experience proves.
That’s a two ended process…the failure can be on the hosts end (a failure to read your cookie correctly) or on your end, having either corrupt or missing cookies.
Wouldn’t surprise me if something along the lines of the former was the culprit here yesterday. (again, just speculating in the absence of hard facts)
I’ve gotten that “loss of cookie” issue with this forum. Once a week, a malware program scans, then deletes mostly cookies. Lately it’s gotten smart enough to leave this forum in place.
Of course, having a hosts file helps too - you’d be surprised how many ads I no longer see…
I was able to post yesterday, but couldn’t log in all day today. I finally managed to do so through Microsoft, where usually I do it through Bing/Google. I’ve never had any problem until today.
I usually don’t use Microsoft because for some reason the Forum won’t remember my log-in like it does when I use Bing/Google. But right now I’m not choosy, just annoyed.
The site was slow coming up this morning, but I have had no other problems except posts that I have read and asked that they be marked “read” will turn up as “unread”. This applies on all the Trains topics and on Classic Trains.
Nothing creates the excitement and confusion like Kalmbach IT
Unfortunately, it’s not just Kalmbach. “Enhanced” cookies seem to be the brown acid* of the new millennium.
*Wavy Gravy 1969
More like the “black bottle”.
I see the issue with ‘read posts’ changing color has been fixed within the past couple of hours. However, I still can’t reach PMs from a phone via any workaround, I still can’t log in to the forums with Chrome, and I still can’t enter text in PMs with Firefox. That’s an awful lot of sloppy code support for functionality that was not rocket science even 30 years ago…
I guess that one of the reasons that hosts tend to be uncooperative in these matters is they would rather not own up to the invasive nature of some of the things being placed on our computers? Not so much actual malware, but rather “pups” and snooperware.
Just to be clear and I am not sure if you have ever been to the Kalmbach Publishing Office in Waukesha but…it’s tiny and Trains Magazine or for that matter Kalmbach Publishing from what I observed has at most one floor of a 5 story office building, maybe 20-30 employees in office cubes mostly.
This discussion software is packaged software they bought as a package. I have my doubts they have more than 3-5 people in their IT Department…if they have an IT Department. I would venture to guess that IT is completely outsourced by contract and they do not have an IT Department.
It is kind of funny how some of you guys assume it is this giant multi-storied company. Long ago they had a larger building when they probably did their own publishing. Now that is outsourced entirely to Quad Graphics.
Also would venture to guess that most of the writers or Kalmbach authors, editors and contributors in Trains Magazine do not just produce exclusively for Trains Magazine but produce for the entire family of Kalmbach magazine publications.
It’s a miracle this site even exists. Most other publications gave up discussion forums long ago for Disqus, facebook, and twitter comments (if they even allow commenting at all).
Chrome works fine for me but I can gain access to PMs only on my laptop using Windows, not on my Android phone. However, CMStPnP and zugmann are correct. Kalmbach is small fry in a shrinking pond. We should be thankful for what we get these days with minimal interference.
Yes, and I’m grateful for it. Those other modes are not very satisfying to me.
This site does the job well, particularly now that they’ve fixed the slow download issue.
Here is an example of the junk cominig from IT.
<br><!-- Web.Config Configuration File --><br><br><configuration><br> <system.web><br> <customErrors mode="Off"/><br> </system.web><br></configuration><br> |
|---|
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the “defaultRedirect” attribute of the application’s configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
I think Brian (and perhaps some others) have mentioned that forum support is outsourced, and somewhat deprecated (as there are many other ‘priorities’ that make more money or provide ‘better purchase relationships’ in their various site codings).
My complaint is precisely that these forums run on a commercial package. As CMStPnP just posted, there are many hooks provided in that code to simplify handling errors and problems, almost certainly including excessive access latency, issues with login security and its ‘failures’, or problems when a piece of malformed advertising locks up the interface or the browser. A couple of savvy high-schooler script kiddees on a summer internship could probably walk the source with a good editor, see where everything in the error handling is documented and write an architecture with fixes, then recompile or whatever to go live (in our modern paradigm where you go live and address your efforts to where users complain ‘it didn’t work’)
One thing that I think has been happening, repeatedly, is that they change ‘ad environment providers’ when someone promises more eyeball metrics or information capture for targeted ads, and they incorporate this into the site code without knowing, or caring, that there are unanticipated issues. All of us probably remember indefinite waits while, down in the corner, we see the browser is waiting for [advertising host], perhaps to provide a list of stored metadata including preferences and history harvested from us.
Kalmbach announced last year (now year-before-last, how the time flies!) that t
I think some folks here take this way too seriously. It’s a free forum for hobbyists and enthusiasts. It works OK most of the time for me and I am using Chrome and Android. Let it be.