Community ste not fully loading

[#1]

Not a problem really, as it only appears to be the PlusNET logo, but every time I reload the forum this morning, the site fails to fully load - I get either 'waiting for pic.photobucket.com' or 'waiting for community.plus.net' . Cancelling the loading removes the message, and everything appears to work, but any idea what the problem is?

Other sites load perfectly OK, including a couple of others I know that pull pictures from photobucket.

Typical - now I've posted this, it seems to be working!

[#2]

I think that there is a portal problem as I am experiencing very slow response and coincidentally e-mails also running slow, had a couple of errors this morning when sending.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

As you are probably aware, the forums are hosted seperate from the plus.net website. However, the main logo at the top left of the page is hosted on the plusnet main site and is pulled in (there is a good reason for this which is explained further down). Anyway.. if there are any issues with the plus.net website, the logo will have trouble loading (and there are currently some issues with the main website which are being looked into).

The other 'photobucket' issue is a bit out of our hands though. That would be a user using photobucket as their avatar image via a URL. Photobucket famously broke millions of websites/blogs last year after stopping external hotlinking of their images unless users pay them $400 per year to allow hotlinking (source: https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photobucket-just-broke-billions-photos-embedded-web/). The problem with this is that the user who used the photobucket image is probably unaware of this limitation and the avatar shows up fine from their browser (due to it being cached in their browser history). The only thing we could do is politely ask them to upload the image here but then that would be limiting freedom of choice.

I may start looking into having the main logo hosted on the forums but to be honest the header content is supposed to be the same across all our sites and when it gets updated myself (or another member of my team) have to make the same changes on several servers. So it also a conscious decision to make that process easier as then its all consistent.

[#4]

@jaread83- thanks for the answer, as I said it is not causing me any real problem as a quick click stops whatever is causing the hold-up and nothing seems 'broken' while I'm using the forum.

I'm aware of the main website problem, but as I rarely visit, I have no experience of that issue. As to photobucket, I'll live with that.