Correction, there is one additional step required to break the Pulse page.

After you have read all the new posts on every watched forum entry, go visit one unwatched forum.

Then go back to the pulse page and it will be broken until someone posts a new comment on one of your watched forum entries.

The work-around, while the pulse page is broken for you, is to go to any page that has the forum footer which is always functional, albeit limited in functionality.

 

Here is a photo of the broken pulse page

 

I also Have a problem. Mine is with large blank spaces haivng recently appeared. I too know who to contact or how to resolve the problem.
Sent messages to Cricket and to contact us. So far no replies.

Be nice if there was as much help for problems with the site as there is overseeing of content.

 

I get blank spaces if I am on mobile. I rotate the phone into landscape and they go away. Not ideal, but it's something.

 

Nobody works on the code. It's basically encased in amber, like a prehistoric mosquito, and if someone were to crack it open, we would soon be eaten by velociraptors. Note: not kidding.

Cricket is the site admin to whom you can report problems, but she's mostly busy stomping spammers. And viewing a pulse page which contains deleted spam (there were a bunch this morning) causes an application error. It's the way of the code here.

 

This is an app from Verticalscope Inc. (or so it says at the bottom of the page.) Contact them to fix the codebase.

Also its not really a hard bug, just a clumsily handled exception. The app can't show entries when there aren't any which explains why its "stuck" until a new post happens. It just should handle the "no records found" exception better.

 

Nobody works on the code. It's basically encased in amber, like a prehistoric mosquito, and if someone were to crack it open, we would soon be eaten by velociraptors. Note: not kidding.

Cricket is the site admin to whom you can report problems, but she's mostly busy stomping spammers. And viewing a pulse page which contains deleted spam (there were a bunch this morning) causes an application error. It's the way of the code here.

- Dave Polaschek

Sad!

 

There is a problem with seemingly a "rogue" entry that will cause a page to not load (w/same error msg.). I say rogue because as more entries are added, the broken page gets pushed further down the line. This has been evident the past few days and the broken page is now in about the double digit page numbers.

If the past repeats, the problem will have drifted off into oblivion in a few more days.

 

Have sent a message to info@verticalscope.com at their contact us listing. Madmark2 suggestion, thanks.
We shall see if anything happens.
Will post results

 

BTDTGTTS

LJ software has the wonderful feature, some might call it a bug?

Anytime admin removes spammer profile from database, AND
the spammers posts are linked into your pulse filter settings because you read the spammers post that was deleted (and was last post in thread); you get application error as software attempts to apply your filters.

One way to fix the pulse errors is by waiting. As more posts are made, and the post missing a valid profile is no longer accessed and the application error stops.
You can accelerate the fix by changing your pulse filter to 7 days, instead of default 30 days. Can also remove the application error by opening the thread previously containing the spammers post, and reading new messages in that thread; which updates your read post count used by pulse page. This only works if thread is active.

Same thing happens with private messages occasionally.
If Admin does not get all the messages sent by spammer removed from the database, once the profile is locked/removed; your message from spammer is orphan; which generates an application error trying to open PM. Once you receive new PM that pushes the orphan PM out of top position, your message box starts working again.

+1 Nobody works on LJ code.
Verticalscope manages over 1000 sites with only 200 staff. Admin has posted they are not updating the existing software. There is rumor from some folks on LJ that moderate on other Verticalscope site; that Verticalscope is developing a new forums software package; and this might be rolled out to Lumberjocks. At least a year has passed since this shared?

 

Wait, so LJ is a hosted solution? Nobody from the LJ community hosts the site on their own equipment?

I did happen to notice that when you upload a picture it becomes a URL into Amazon S3, so that definitely would be some evidence that the entire site is hosted on Amazon, though I didn't necessarily draw the conclusion that hosting the site was through another provider.

I think I had discounted the notion that someone pays to have a company provide LJ and instead thought it was a bespoke development because of the 1990's look-and-feel (which I adore, btw).

 

Wait, so LJ is a hosted solution? Nobody from the LJ community hosts the site on their own equipment? - DevinT

It's worse than you want to know.

Lumberjocks is owned by a company that focuses on buying websites, and making money by traffic driven to see the advertising. They pay Amazon for hosting services from advertising revenue.
They have zero interest in wood working, and own all kinds of different sites.

IMHO - the only reason they are even considering updating old forum software, is because smart folks know to turn off the 3rd party links; which stops advertising from being loaded and they don't get paid.
I predict in (near?) future, that just like the newspaper and other free content sites; we will soon get a pop up notice you have to enable 3rd party links to allow the advertisements and/or tracking; else the site is disabled for your browser. I desperately want to be wrong on this prediction.

Cheers!

 

I have tried a lot of woodworking forums and like LJ the best. I like format with projects, blogs, reviews and actual forum. This site has more projects posted than any other.

I could find things to complain about but why? I just do not understand spending time to cause the pulse feature to have an error.

 

I am a software engineer, like my mother was. It is in my nature that when I find a problem that I do not understand to try and create "replication steps" so that someone that is familiar with the code (sometimes me) can replicate the bug in a way that they are able to understand how to fix it.

To be honest, it effects me on a daily basis. I have only been on LJ for 8 days and with exception of the first 2 days, every single day the pulse page is broken (sometimes for the entire day).

 

I have tried a lot of woodworking forums and like LJ the best. I like format with projects, blogs, reviews and actual forum. This site has more projects posted than any other. - Redoak49

+100

I could find things to complain about but why? I just do not understand spending time to cause the pulse feature to have an error. - Redoak49

Just an observation:
You will notice the person asking about forum error has 162 posts in 8 days on site, or 20 posts per day. They have also posted 12 projects. Welcome active folks like DevinT, and help them anyway I can.

IME - Engaged folks with spare time and some software knowledge, will dig to bottom of web problems hoping to help the site admin fix them. For sites I manage; appreciated it when community members took the time to debug software issues. If Verticalscope cared, or Cricket had power to change software; they would likely appreciate these kind of efforts too. But, YMMV

 

One can usually track down info on a website through the ICANN whois database:

% whois lumberjocks.com
Domain Name: LUMBERJOCKS.COM
Registry Domain ID: 222614175DOMAINCOM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.uniregistrar.com
Registrar URL: http://www.uniregistry.com
Updated Date: 2019-07-18T04:20:34Z
Creation Date: 2005-10-04T09:03:55Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-10-04T09:03:55Z
Registrar: GoDaddy Online Services Cayman Islands Ltd.
Registrar IANA ID: 1659
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@uniregistry.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4426008800
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C1.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C2.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C3.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
Name Server: NS-CLOUD-C4.GOOGLEDOMAINS.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned

 

Not sure exactly what that's supposed to tell us other than the fact they used a cheap registrar.

 

Not sure exactly what that s supposed to tell us other than the fact they used a cheap registrar.

- DevinT

Exactly. Go Daddy + set to expire in a few months (which I'm sure will be renewed)

 

Captain,

I found a way to fix the pulse page based on your advice.

• In the pulse footer, pull up every page that I am watching in a separate tab.
• Unwatch each one
• Refresh the page and scroll back down to the pulse footer
• Repeat until there are none of your watched items in the pulse footer
  (in a separate window)
• Pull up a page with the pulse footer on it
• Open each of the entries in a separate tab
• Close each tab
  (close this window)
• Go back to your tabs and re-watch the items

This is the only way that I could find the offending page. The fact that the pulse footer is capable of displaying tainted pages in its list while the pulse page is not is a problem, but that is also the solution. Pulling up every forum, blog, review, etc. for the past N days is not really tenable and it wasn't working for me, while the above did.

 

To be honest, it effects me on a daily basis. I have only been on LJ for 8 days and with exception of the first 2 days, every single day the pulse page is broken (sometimes for the entire day).

- DevinT

Hey Devin
Spam posts have been particulary high in the past couple of weeks, generally Cricket will switch to new posts needing approval if it continues, and then the problem goes away.

It's a balancing act keeping LJ open to new users and stopping spammers which is managed pretty well.

Unfortunately code fixes aren't possible AFAICT, honestly this one happens infrequently enough to almost class it a heisenberg bug.

 

The offending page that was crashing the pulse page for me every time it hit my filtered list was somewhere in this smaller list displayed by the pulse footer:

Once I loaded that set of pages, the pulse page worked again.

Like you say, it's probably I just needed to refresh it because it had a spam deleted from it.

The problem for me is that I never knew when, after reading something which would make it disappear from my filtered pulse, if the poisoned page would pop up on the list again, having percolated back up to the top.

 

MikeB,

Since I found a viable workaround, I'm feeling better. It was quite stressing trying to read the backlog of items that might interest you and some blog, review, forum, or project that was tainted in the past 30 days kept popping up on my pulse page destroying it.

By the way, this affected me because I am using the pulse page as a list of things I have not read. Each day I go through a few more posts that I have not read and if it doesn't interest me, I don't watch it and then it disappears from my filtered pulse. This way I can kind of get caught up on the content here without revisiting things I have already looked at and are not interested in.

 

I just stopped marking stuff to watch, the new comments count is simple enough to catch up on from the pulse page.
It's obvious enough to track things I'm looking at and disappears from the first few pages in a day or two that even my memory can ignore stuff I looked at that I didn't want ot follow.

 

Thanks Mike. That perspective helps. Still learning all the bells and whistles, knobs and widgets.