I’ve re-enabled nested comments

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We’re running an experiment, to see if nested (threaded) comments on AskWoody bring the server to its knees. We’ll know shortly. In the interim, for t
[See the full post at: I’ve re-enabled nested comments]

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jelson, SueW, JDeC, Elly, HiFlyer, Microfix, abbodi86, AJNorth, Cybertooth, MrBrian, walker

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It’s turtles all the way down on nested comment test posts!

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ryegrass

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eewww  slow here, sorry

* _ ... _ *

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@Woody:  Thank you so much for taking this step – – – – I had reached the “point of no return”, trying to navigate that other system.   Thank you, thank you, thank you!   🙂

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Hello Walker, Agreed. I too was ready to stop reading posts.
Thank you Woody for putting it back.

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walker

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woody wrote:

to make it easier to find new replies, try searching (Ctrl+F) for the word “New.”

There’s an even better trick for some web browsers: Searching for “report new” in a given topic finds new posts, and nothing else.

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walker, SueW, HiFlyer, AJNorth

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Fred wrote:

eewww slow here, sorry

Same here.

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AJNorth

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Slow loading here too 🙁

 

Group B HP Pavilion-dv6 Win7x64 Home Premium-Intel Core i5-3210M CPU

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It’s working OK here (no difference in page loading speed vs. the “flat” format).

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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HiFlyer

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Is nesting working?

No, it is not. This was a reply to @Cybertooth

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Microfix

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In response to @pkcano’s post, I concur; however, I’ve not noticed a speed reduction from 12hrs ago.

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Microfix

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Reply to Kirsty: yup replies don’t indent and I too have noticed a lag in the website. Hope this helps.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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I am seeing nested replies.

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Nested comments are showing just fine for me. Speed is pretty much the same as it was before; a delay of 3-5 seconds before the page loads, but it loads very quickly once it starts which, to me, makes it alright. It’s the same with both formats for me.

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Eureka! I found the correct setting… in a completely different place.

11 users thanked author for this post.

GoneToPlaid, walker, Noel Carboni, Pepsiboy, fk5353, SueW, Sessh, HiFlyer, Elly, PKCano, satrow

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It’s a shame I can only add 1 “Thank You” – would like, maybe, 1K of ’em!!!  🙂

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walker, Pepsiboy, SueW, Elly

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Cybertooth wrote:

It’s working OK here (no difference in page loading speed vs. the “flat” format).

test the nest-don’t think it worked.

speed o.k.

 

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Not working using IE 11 or Chrome. Still getting multi-page postings on various threads, EG on

Thurrott: Stop the relentless release of new Windows versions

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This is a test, I’m seeing new nested replies now (21:30 PST), seeing if a self-reply appears as nested.

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Yes, my self-reply appeared as nested. This reply to a reply should also be nested.

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Yeah, settings have been tweaked and re-tweaked 🙂

woody wrote:

Eureka! I found the correct setting… in a completely different place.

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No bueno

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How  now?

Seems like the site is grinding to a halt, once again….

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Fast to search, fast to read. Slow to serve up the comment box, even slower to post the actual comment.

Maybe it is time to consider Forum software. If that is ever the case, please do not use Tapatalk…, yuck!

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Sessh

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Tapatalk is a client-side mobile app that works with several different forum software setups… according to Wikipedia, they are phpBB3, vBulletin, xenForo, IPBoard, Simple Machines Forum, MyBB, bbPress, Kunena, Vanilla, ASP Playground, and Drupal.  It’s not itself a server-side forum program, from what I can tell.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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HiFlyer, Bill C., satrow

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Thanks. I had heard of Tapatalk on mobile (smartphones), but recently some of the forums I follow via a PC using FF have greatly changed in appearence to a minimalist hard to read and search format that when you enter the forum the URL says tapatalk.com/xxxx, as does the profile page. I suspect they have bought up a forum software firm.

They tried to get you to create a Tapatalk account, but will allow legacy users to login without the account. Inspection of the Tapatalk Account Privacy notice shows they are a comment aggegator across many sites like Discus. No thanks! Too much data collected and then presented.

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Elly, HiFlyer

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Agree with Bill’s comment. Loading the comment box and posting a comment take the longest, but again, it’s always been that way since the site was attacked. Is it more important that the comment section of the site be easy to follow at the risk of things moving a little slower or is it more important to try to make the site move a little faster even if it makes the comment section several magnitudes more difficult to follow and get anything useful out of it.

As I mentioned before, the comment section that allows visitors to easily read and follow the discussions is the life blood of this place because that’s where we all share ideas and that’s where a lot of the interesting stuff is to be found. Crippling that seems to be counter productive to me. There has to be a better way. I think more value would be lost without the coherent and easy to follow comment section that this place has always had.

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Elly, AlexEiffel, HiFlyer, jelson, SueW

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Those of you who haven’t been returned to nested comments yet, clear your browser caches; many use settings that don’t check frequently enough for changes, eg. on a per session basis.

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HiFlyer, Elly

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Your site is fast and fine with nested comments, earlier without nested comments it was my ISP’s problem.

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Thanks for re-enabling pages displayed. It took me a long time to re-locate a comment that I wanted to reply to. In order for the search to work, I had to be on the right page.

Suggestion:  Not sure if possible with your software, but I noticed some websites with multiple pages give users an option (button to click) to display all pages. That way less pages display for the casual observer, but all pages can be displayed when needed.

Also wondering if gravatars could be taking up resources. A few days ago it took about 30 seconds for the gravatars to load. I noticed an article on hostwinds.com on how to fix high wordpress cpu usage and there was a section on gravatars.

Thanks again for your website and thanks to the helpful community. Hope all goes well with the server resources.

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HiFlyer

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Yippeeeee!  Thank you, @Woody!!

Win 7 SP1 Home Premium 64-bit; Office 2010; Group B (SaS); Former 'Tech Weenie'

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HiFlyer

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Woody posted:
to make it easier to find new replies, try searching (Ctrl+F) for the word “New.”

Is this trick available only for logged-in users ? From what I can see, none of the comments on any of the AskWoody pages are marked as “New”, so CTRL-F doesn’t help.

Nested comments are working fine here, but there is no difference in page-loading speed compared to the version with non-nested comments. Each AskWoody page always takes 4-5 secs to load without any user intervention.

As is the usual case, when I stop the page-loading after 2-3 secs of nothingness, the page will nevertheless get rendered all at once — including all the comments & the Reply box. And everything remains functional. So it seems that the slow page-load is due to it trying to fetch something that is not necessary for the page to function.

Previously, when the site allowed public comments with submission of names & email address per comment but without having to login, I don’t recall running into slow-loading pages, although the comments were all non-nested. And there were certainly lots of comments under each post even back then.

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Yep, the “New” tag only appears for those who have logged in.

If you’re running anonymously, how could WordPress keep track of what’s new?

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@woody, @PKCano — Thanks for the info.

So logged-in users with a habit of clearing browser history (including session cookies) after their last log-out will not get to see which comments are “New” since their last visit either ?

Is this “New since last visit” function (&/or similar user-tracking functions) the culprit for slowing down page-loading, since it must track which comments on the page are new for every individual logged-in user ? If we multiply this for every AskWoody page for all currently logged-in users, would that pose a negative performance impact on the website as a whole ?

According to BillC’s comment:

Slow to serve up the comment box, even slower to post the actual comment.

And Sessh essentially said the same thing:

Loading the comment box and posting a comment take the longest

For non-logged in users, the comments & comment box show up at the same time as the rest of the page. Here, the delay occurs when every page simply shows as blank while trying to load something invisible for several seconds, but I can always manually stop the page-loading every time, upon which the whole page appears instantly & everything remains fully functional (except for the lack of the said “New” labels).

For non-logged in users, there is a lag of 3-4 secs after a comment is submitted, before the page refreshes itself & then shows everything instantly. Since the aforementioned comments from logged-in users seem to describe this is as quite an issue, what’s the comment-submission lag for logged-in users ?

Personally, I find comment-submission (upload) lags relatively common, because I encounter this at every locally or externally-hosted commenting function elsewhere — except perhaps for Facebook/Disqus-type of “instantly-appearing” comments. (Note: My connection is ADSL, max 1 Mbps download speed, with a much slower upload speed.)

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Yes, the “New” only works for logged-in users. A logged-in user is one individual, so new since last visit works. Anonymous is a multitude, so new since last visit doesn’t make any sense.

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SueW, Elly

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Everything still working well here – nesting, loading speed, etc.

Congratulations (and thanks) to Woody & Co.!

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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SueW

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PKCano wrote:

Yes, the “New” only works for logged-in users. A logged-in user is one individual, so new since last visit works. Anonymous is a multitude, so new since last visit doesn’t make any sense.

PKCano,

For you, Woody, and the rest of the crew, nesting is working just fine here this morning.  I’m running Win7 SP1 x64, IE11, and I’m set to automatically clear all cookies on exit. I also notice no slowdown on the site.

Dave

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I don’t care that strongly about post nesting (though I personally do prefer it), but please don’t revert back to the “split threads onto multiple pages” approach. It’s simply not as useful.

If the server is more heavily loaded by generating long, single page threads, it may be at least partially because that format is just better to read and people use the site more. It’s a case where you can’t just compare performance – if there is a cost, there is also a benefit.

Put another way, you may not want to make changes that drive people away or make them dislike your site just to save computer resources. You want the site to be popular as all get out, and the service provider needs to suck it up and make it work.

-Noel

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SueW, Elly, AlexEiffel, HiFlyer, Sessh

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Hello Noel, Well put.   Hosting site needs to get a better PC or larger data pipe.

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Noel Carboni

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I have noted, because of some occasional site error messages, that the server is apparently running Ubuntu Linux.

I found several sites, including the following, that describe how the mitigations for the Spectre/Meltdown issues can negatively affect the efficiency of servers – sometimes quite a lot!

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/24/meltdown-spectre-and-ubuntu-what-you-need-to-know/

There is some alarming info on how much those affect performance.

IMO the whole “trade security for performance” aspect of this thing has been way too glossed-over. It’s a sad state of affairs when few folks are interested in the specifics and practicality of things any more and all we do is try to focus on the most prominent headline with the best developed marketing campaign, then we have to react to how bad things have become.

One can be forgiven for feeling wrapped around someone else’s finger…

-Noel

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Elly, HiFlyer, Sessh

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“We’re running an experiment, to see if nested (threaded) comments on AskWoody bring the server to its knees. We’ll know shortly.”

You’ve been too entangled with Microsoft, or am I the only one who thinks, this sound like the Microsoft way? 😀

Release the thing and see whatever happens…

Thanks for reverting back! Much preferred!

And we, the Woody Crash Test Dummies, will do what we can to kill the server!

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I discovered yet another way in which I may have been missing unread posts by relying upon the “new” tag: After one initiates a new post, one needs to check for the “new” tag before submitting the post. Argh!

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This advice generalizes to any situation in which the site (re)generates a topic page. The problem is that it can be difficult to remember to check for the “new” tag in some of these circumstances. 🙁

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