Boards is slow! (was:What is Star-adserver.com)

KTRIC

Every boards.ie page i try and open i get the message "waiting for www.star-adserver.com" or "transfering from www.star-adserver.com" at the bottom of my browser and it's soooo bloody slow.

Would someone like to shed some light on what is going on.

Thanks,
K

seamus

It's the ad in the top-right (you may not be able to see it). It's downloaded from star-adserver.com.

monkeyfudge

I was just about to start a thread on this myself.

It has become incredibly slow. Any page just hangs on it for ages when loading.

Is there any chance it could be set to be the last thing to load in on a page?

It's making browsing boards.ie on broadband similar to 56k

Something needs to be done about it

This thread should have a better title to draw admin attention to this problem.


"star adserver slowing boards to a crawl-please fix!!"

seamus

For the time being, install adblock on Firefox and add *.star-adserver.com/* to your filter list.

KTRIC

seamus wrote:

For the time being, install adblock on Firefox and add *.star-adserver.com/* to your filter list.

Will do, thanks Seamus.

ixoy

That made a huge difference, cheers Seamus. Still for the many folk unaware of the root cause, or how to fix it, I think it's something the admins might wanna check out.

dudara

Thanks for the info Seamus, normal service has been resumed!

phenom

Thanks Seamus, This was getting very annoying.

seamus

ixoy wrote:

That made a huge difference, cheers Seamus. Still for the many folk unaware of the root cause, or how to fix it, I think it's something the admins might wanna check out.

It did for me too. I noticed it was slow, but put it down to other factors

No ad actually appears - star-adserver.com is either under load or not up. It's owned by www.salesonline.ie and the Administrative contact is david_at_salesonlineDOTeye-ee
Probably best to give him a nudge and tell him his server is unhappy and his clients will be even moreso soon enough.

John R

Alternatively put the following line into your hosts file, located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc in XP.
127.0.0.1 www.star-adserver.com

quarryman

adblock worked great. strange how not everyone is affected by this.

Chalk

i reckon they are.
i was affected, nut instead of complaining i was going to write a cheque for a few grand to buy a new server.

saved me some moolah there lads

NotMe

I blocked those ads ages ago.

quarryman

so what does this star-adserver.com do? Does it follow the pages I visit from boards, track what forums i visit and display ads that reflect this?

spyware like?

Inspector Gadget

I've been having the same problem. I don't want to adblock stuff on boards, primarily because it's not too obtrusive and "for a good cause", but to be honest it was driving me nuts, so I had to. If any of the admins are reading this, can anything be done?

Cheers,
Gadget

unkel

Thanks Seamus, huge difference

Only thing is that Dev et. al. might not be pleased with this suggestion? Surely that site generates revenue for boards.ie?

monkeyfudge

It's not generating any revenue at the moment as it's invisible because of the problems that were happening with the drop down menu.

Personally I'm a subscriber, so my conscious is pretty clear with using the adblocker.

Trojan

Regards ads, I block anything that interferes with my browsing experience. If it doesn't interfere, it doesn't get blocked. My conscience is clear on this one too

Trojan

Oh, except for doubleclick. Block *.doubleclick.*/*, the feckers, first thing I do on Firefox install.

pickarooney

It's still fairly slow here, after blocking that server.

seamus

unkel wrote:

Only thing is that Dev et. al. might not be pleased with this suggestion? Surely that site generates revenue for boards.ie?

Not when it's broken
We know from past experience that DeV is an unhappy man when people's ads interfere with boards. If/when this is fixed, I'll happily remove the filter from adblock.

DeVore

Ads disabled until the system is back up and working ok. Sorry about the inconvenience.


To clarify, yes I get annoyed when people block our (inobtrusive ads) simply *because* we make them inobtrusive and respectful. Afaik there is no tracking or naughty things being done by Salesonline (who are selling ads for us). They are under clear instruction that such things will lead to anger from us. They seem like good guys in general so I'll cut them slack for the moment.
I understand that if there is a technical problem then people should block them to continue using Boards. But if they want to continue using Boards long term, then they need to unblock them when they are working ok again. We simply cannot possibly exist beyond the end of this year without generating at least enough revenue to replace hardware. Thats not to speak of other costs we have.
We'll get this sorted and back on the road.

DeV.

Mercury_Tilt

This post has been deleted.

seamus

DeVore wrote:

Ads disabled until the system is back up and working ok. Sorry about the inconvenience.

......

/me makes note to update filter tomorrow morning

Villain

Still seems slow to me, top menu loads then it just sits there for about 5 seconds?

Sleepy

Happening to me too. Sites been slow for the last two days. Browsing on Firefox here at home and on IE in work but it happens on both.

Is there any way of serving the ad after the rest of the page has loaded?

The Free Man

ahhh, adblock worked for me, thanx seamus

Sparky

mad slow for me aswell, top banner works then a 10sec. wait for the rest of the page

Sparky

sorted it with the firefox adblock

XDA

Still very slow here as well, every page load is taking at least 30 seconds, making boards nearly unusable, installing adblock now ...

XDA