Page no longer displays correctly. Firefox update to blame?

Today when I logged onto the Herbarium, I wondered if it had been changed in any way, because my display has changed.

I draw the box just like always, and click "Start this record", and see the bottom of the enlargement. I can't see the top, which shows the name of the current field I am filling, or the "x" at top right of enlargement for closing the box.

These are too useful to do without. Did you guys make a change that could have this effect? Is the the latest Firefox update, which I got this afternoon? Or has my screen just gone bonkers (again)?

Posted June 27, 2013 11:59 PM

by ghewson

I see a change too. It can't be Firefox, because I was using the new release 8 or 9 hours ago, and NfN was OK then.

I /can/ see the top of the enlargement, but it's definitely moved to the top of the screen. Also, the introductory text with "Got it. Let me transcribe!" at the bottom now doesn't fit the window, so the window has a scroll bar (not that that matters, but it's different from what it was).

Posted June 28, 2013 6:19 AM

by ghewson in response to ghewson's comment.

Another thing: in the text entry box, the descenders on letters such as g and j are no longer visible.

Posted June 28, 2013 6:27 AM

by ghewson in response to ghewson's comment.

And on Calbug I can't even see the label without scrolling. Sorry, this is too broken for me to use now.

Posted June 28, 2013 6:31 AM

by ghewson in response to ghewson's comment.

Herbarium and Calbug are both OK in Chrome.

Posted June 28, 2013 7:46 AM

by El_Lion

I wonder it ever worked for you in Firefox. When I started with Serengeti Pictures nothing worked. I was so frustrated until I had the brilliant idea to try Chrome. Never went back to Firefox since, at least not for Zooniverse.

Posted June 28, 2013 9:37 AM

by mamalizard

I am having the same problems as above, using Firefox in Windows. Going to switch to the Linux half of my machine and see if other browsers and Linux firefox have the same probs. Will update on results.

Posted June 28, 2013 11:02 AM

by mamalizard

Me again. Firefox not showing site properly in Linux either. Konqueror working well - no scrolling necessary & text descenders all showing correctly. (Only tested Callbug). May be (at least to some extent) due to recent Firefox upgrades?

Posted June 28, 2013 11:18 AM

by bumishness admin

How about now?

Posted June 28, 2013 7:06 PM

by ghewson in response to mamalizard's comment.

Konqueror only works with WebKit, not KHTML -- this is unchanged today compared with yesterday.

The problem only affects Firefox (of the browsers I've tried), and as I said, it was working yesterday when I'd already installed the new release. Also, I tried another machine today that still had the previous release, 21.0, and the problem with NfN was apparent there too.

Posted June 28, 2013 7:09 PM

by ghewson in response to bumishness's comment.

Thanks, it's OK now (Herbarium and Calbug).

Posted June 28, 2013 7:22 PM

by bumishness admin in response to ghewson's comment.

Excellent, good to know.

Apologies for the error folks. I made a change to something else entirely which had some unintended side effects.

Now time to write some regression tests so I stop breaking things...

Posted June 28, 2013 7:35 PM

by riskingraisin

I am having the problem as described in the initial post, including the hidden descenders. Using Firefox 21.0, have not recently updated that I can remember.

Posted June 28, 2013 11:52 PM

by rusalka

Same problem. Firefox with Mac. Everything is on the top screen.

Posted June 29, 2013 4:29 AM

by ghewson

Yes, the problem has reappeared for me too.

Posted June 29, 2013 6:32 AM

by nosenabook in response to ghewson's comment.

"Too broken to use" is where I am at.
Mostly I wanted to know if the problems were mine alone, or more universal.
I could try Chrome. At the moment I am caught up in another project.

eta: Just saw the second page of comments and will check what I see today.
eta2: I see a black screen right now. 08:30 EDT on Saturday.
eta3: Black screen only when going from here via "Return to Classifying." From the "Collections" page no issues at all.
Problem fixed. I'm in Firefox with Windows 7.

Thanks!

Posted June 29, 2013 1:27 PM

by bumishness admin in response to ghewson's comment.

Post Mortem

I finally tracked down what was causing this behavior. I would like to say first that I apologize for the interruptions and general buginess over the last day or two. Downtimes like this are unacceptable and I very much appreciate you folks sticking around in spite of this.

Technical Explanation

What happened was I implemented a new background job that populates certain data onto the Notes site before it is downloaded to the user. Because Notes is a static site that communicates via AJAX, and not served out of a backend framework like Rails,. it must ask the server for project statistics and different collections every time the page loads, even if that information is pretty much the same for everybody.

Traditionally anyway. Like I said, I cheated this by running a scheduled task that asks the server for this info and manually places it onto the page. That part of it actually worked quite well. The problem was when I placed the info onto the page, I unknowingly stripped out the doctype of the html file. Without a doctype, Chrome and Firefox fell back to Quirks mode, which was the cause of the unpredictable behavior across the site. Soon as I ensured the doctype wasn't touched during this process, all the problems went away.

Again, very sorry for this. The science teams are really depending upon you to do these transcriptions and I'll try my best to not cause any more problems.

Posted June 29, 2013 4:48 PM

by ghewson in response to bumishness's comment.

Thanks, looks good now.

Posted June 30, 2013 7:58 AM

by nosenabook in response to bumishness's comment.

Well said, and thanks for the explanation.

Posted June 30, 2013 2:41 PM

by riskingraisin

Thanks!

Posted July 1, 2013 2:31 AM