Pictures and metronomes in Flash Teases

[Shaddar86]

I've tried to search in older topics in order to find someone that have had this issue, but with no luck.

I'm having problems with almost all Flash Teases when it comes to show some of their pictures. Consequently, neither the metronomes "bip" along with the missed "picture showing".

If could be of use, I have Firefox as web browser. Considering that the problem pops up just with Flash Teases and just with some of the pics, not all of them, could it be just a problem of my connection or browser? Otherwise, what do you suggest me to do?

Thanks :)

[les]

post a screen shot so we can see what you mean.

[Bandit224]

I've seen a small number of flash teases that appear to have a blank screen for a short while. This has two reasons: the flash tease uses a lot of behind the scene software commands (like randomizing pictures for example), and the other reason is a really slow internet connection combined with really quick timers (5-10 second timers). If a tease's timer to change pages goes off before the tease finishes loading a page, the tease will continue to download both the previous page and the current page. Obviously, causing a small bandwidth inefficiency. Sadly, these are unavoidable; other than having a faster connection and a faster computer.

If you are using ad-block plus, you may need to disable pop-up blocking for Milovana. Pop-up blockers will consider some picture hosts as "adverstisers," but you would probably notice both classic and flash teases have pictures missing if that were the case.

As for the blips, if you hear the sound at the start of every flash tease, then you can hear the blips. However, most teases aren't supposed to have any sound in them at all; they usually have people load metronomes, videos, and other things through a separate website in a link they provide in the tease. Some tease creators may be forgetful, and not post a direct link to a metronome site.

As with les said, posting a screenshot of a tease where the issue occurs will help a lot in narrowing down the issue.

[les]

I have never had an issue with adblock plus and flash teases.

I suggest trying the affected teases in chrome.
Preferably a new install.

Also check which version of flash and firefox you are using.
Should be firefox 8 unless you are using portable firefox.
And Flash version 11,1,102,55 installed.
if not try updating them both.

Do you have troubles with you tube as well because they are flash as well.

[Shaddar86]

Here's a stamp. Anyway, I'll try to upgrade Flash. In the stamp I was waiting from 5-6 minutes. It's completly random. Never had problems with YouTube

[seraph0x]

Tricky. The pictures in FlashTeases are preloaded one page ahead. If you waited 5-6 minutes a picture still didn't show up, the download must have failed. This could be a tease-specific problem or an issue with your Internet connection.

We recently had some load issues, which would affect FlashTease images more than regular teases. Can you try during off-peak hours (any time but when it's afternoon/evening in the US) and see if the problem is less during those times?

[cumhardy]

quite often for me pictures dont show up in flash teases, even since getting a faster internet connection

[supermokkori]

quite often for me pictures dont show up in flash teases, even since getting a faster internet connection

Indeed... the problem of images not showing up is happening a little more frequently lately. For me, most recently it's been happening in the FlashTease "The One In Vegas".

A more annoying problem is some of the Flashteases with metronome stroke beats are not playing - specifically these great Flashteases: Nezhul's "Will You Want To Go On?" and Uberman's "The Awesome Competition".

EDIT UPDATE: I should make mention these errors are happening on Mozilla Firefox 6.0. When I try it on Chrome, all the Flashteases work fine. So could be a browser thing.

[JamesLast]

I am using Firefox 9.0 + 100Mbit downstream.

Waited for about 15 minutes for one picture to load, then gave up. Happend several times.

I don't know how skilled the guy is, who wrote the flash-stuff, but it would be nice if some "error" could appear after some time.. so that ones knows that he should see a picture.

pls fix this.

[seraph0x]

Here are some questions to help me narrow down this issue:

- When did you first notice the problem? (Or if it has always been happening for you, when did you first start visiting?)

- Where are you located? Milovana is split in two regions: Americas (North and South) and rest of the world. I just need to know which of these two regions you're in.

- supermokkori reported that it is working in Chrome, can you confirm?

[JamesLast]

> - When did you first notice the problem? (Or if it has always been happening for you, when did you first start visiting?)
About 3 weeks ago.

> - Where are you located? Milovana is split in two regions: Americas (North and South) and rest of the world. I just need to know which of these two regions you're in.
I am located in DE (EU), so 'rest of the world'.

Spoiler: show

--- http://www.milovana.com ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 96 received, 4% packet loss, time 107225ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 24.188/27.715/145.021/12.610 ms

> - supermokkori reported that it is working in Chrome, can you confirm?
I tried Chromium and the problem still exists.

[seraph0x]

I noticed today a lot of hanging server processes and they were all hanging on FlashTease image requests. Based on that I think I tracked down the problem. Unfortunately, fixing it requires me to rewrite that whole script, so it's not an easy fix.

Don't know when I'll have time to do it, but at least I know what the issue is now.

[seraph0x]

Just implemented step 1 of the fix for this problem: FlashTease media assets are now once again stored on our own servers in addition to S3.

Next up is step 2: We need to download the files from previous teases back down to our own servers.

Finally, in step 3 I'll switch over the asset selection from the S3 API to the local filesystem. This should fix the issue from this thread. It may also fix the downtime (if there aren't other issues also involved in causing that.)

I'd love to give an ETA, but I'm basically squeezing this in whenever I have a free minute. Hopefully, it'll be done by the end of the week.

[seraph0x]

Step two complete. Preparing for the third and final (for now) step. Once the third step is finished, expect the issue from this thread to go away, but there might be other minor issues that crop up that we'll fix afterwards.

[seraph0x]

Step three complete. Please report any problem you encounter! There may well be new issues cropping up because of this change!