Do your LJ pages seem to keep loading forever?

[andrewducker]

For a couple of weeks now my LJ pages kept being stuck in "Loading" mode - with the little animated circle in the header that made it clear they were still trying to download more of the page.

Due to a discussion in james_nicoll's journal I discovered this was linked to Adblock Plus and a glitch on LJ's backend. Being a paid user I don't get ads anyway, so I turned off ABP for livejournal.com, and now everything's working properly!

Much happier, this has been annoying me for weeks...

Comments

[pseudomonas]

AFAICT what Adblock plus is trying to block for paid users is various trackers and web bugs.

[andrewducker]

Probably.

Luckily for me, I don't care about those.

[pseudomonas]

Lucky old you.

[marahmarie]

I'm curious as to if the ABP bug is why Firefox 29 Beta was so slow for me on DW? (I've since uninstalled it, but being a really sloppy upgrade, it totally mated with Firefox 28 so I actually had to go into regedit, then use Everything by Void Tools and CCleaner to wipe it out and start over with a fresh copy of 28 to get my speeds up on DW again). I can safely disable ABP here, and I don't use LJ, so no biggie on that (but I'd like to know if the LJ/ABP bug will be an DW/ABP bug, too, because eventually I will want to upgrade to the official 29).

[marahmarie]

Exactly why I don't use and, in fact, decided to leave Livejournal: trackers and web bugs, not to mention full-blown ads and link hijacking scripts. I can't even look at the name "LJ" without the hair standing up on the back of my neck over that to this day.

[pseudomonas]

There's a tracker on this page too, Google Analytics, according to Ghostery.

[andrewducker]

Ayup.

That'd be me, using the built-in functionality to get an idea of relative traffic to DW/LJ.

(Last month: 383 to DW, 6705 to LJ)

[marahmarie]

I did know that thanks to my own past use of Ghostery. I tend to allow myself to forget it, though, thanks to my dislike of Google and the fact that there's nothing I can do about it. OK, so you got me.

Denise insists on running Analytics rather than have DW roll its own tracking solution for statistical purposes, which is something I'm not happy about, but comparing that one tracker to what LJ throws on the page is comparing night to day. Concession I have to make and live with to be here, I guess. :)

ETA: Ahem. OK, forgot that's only on DW site scheme (it does use Analytics!) and your reply to your own comment did not get emailed me so I only just now saw that. Andrew, getting me all confused here - stop!

Also, I thought something was wrong with you saying that because Denise has said many times in dw_news and other DW venues that despite using GA she has no idea how many visits each journal gets, which I actually double-checked each time she said it by running Ghostery on my DW to make sure. But! I figured you saying that meant maybe she'd finally decided to expand GA's use.

Glad to know she didn't because that would in fact make me even more uncomfortable about her tracking solution of choice.