I have two pieces of good site news, one site alert, and one evergreen suggestion to share today from the general tech (Engineering and Product) teams.
The first good news is that the site outages we experienced last week have been addressed in a way that should make the state far more stable. The other good news is that we have deployed a couple of other fixes to improve site loading speed, with more forthcoming soon.
The site alert is that one of our latest deploys caused a problem within the story and comment editor. (FYI, we use a built-in text editor called “ckeditor.”) The short and non-technical explanation is that some of the backend code didn’t sync right away with what your browser expects to see, and so it wound up loading an incomplete version of the editor. But this issue is also a matter of timing, because depending on what you were doing on the site, the various sections of the back end code might have gotten together without coming to your attention.
If the comment/story editor has not been behaving for you in the past 24 hours, however, there is a relatively easy fix available for you to do: empty your browser’s cache. The steps involved comprise the evergreen (that is, perennially green/current) suggestion I’d like to share.
Note that I say “relatively easy.” That’s because there are actually four different levels of clearing site data from your browser.
- Page refresh
- “Hard” page refresh
- Empty cache → the minimum step needed now
- Delete site data
We’re all familiar with step one and probably step two, I suspect. They’re executed by clicking the little “circle” or “curl” icon in the URL window or pressing Cmd/Ctrl + R on your keyboard. Doing either one of these does reload the page to bring in new site data, but in a rather superficial way. These are appropriate steps to take when the initial load got interrupted by a connection issue, perhaps, or because your screen froze–relatively innocuous and common situations. Step two, the “hard” refresh, is done by adding the shift key, and is a little more thorough.
Step four, the “delete site data” is likely also familiar to you. That’s what you do when you “clear your cache, including cookies”--which signs you out and deletes site data from your browser (not, notably, from our servers/site archives). This step definitely does the job, and it is needed often enough that browsers typically make it pretty easy to execute. You’ll need to log in again afterward, and all comments will be unread, but it makes everything shiny and clean.
So, using step four will do the trick in this case too. But for this ckeditor glitch, it’s a little more than you need to do. For those interested in expanding your troubleshooting repertoire, we’d like to explain how to do step three, emptying your browser cache, which will solve the problem without logging you out or marking all comments unread.
Special thanks to adamwhitley and elfling for their contributions to this post, though naturally the usual disclaimers apply.
Clearing Your Browser Cache
Chrome
1 Click on the menu icon at the top right.
2 Go to More Tools and click the Clear Browsing Data option.
3 Change the Time Range to ‘All Time’ and uncheck “Browsing History” and “Cookies and other site data.”
4 Click the Clear Data button.
Firefox
1 In the Menu bar at the top of the screen, click Firefox and select Preferences.
2 Select the Privacy & Security panel.
3 In the Cookies and Site Data section, click Clear Data.
4 Remove the check mark in front of “Cookies and Site Data”
5 Leave “Cached Web Content” check marked, and click the Clear button.
Safari
1 Click on the Safari tab at the top left of your screen and choose Preferences from the dropdown menu.
2 Click the Advanced tab of the menu that pops up.
3 At the end of the tab, select the Show Develop menu in menu bar box and close the Preferences menu.
4 Click the Develop tab from the Safari menu at the top of the page.
5 Click Empty Caches from the dropdown menu.
Edge
1 Open Microsoft Edge, select Menu (3 dots icon on top right corner of the browser) > Settings > Privacy & services.
2 Under Clear browsing data, select Choose what to clear.
3 Select the "Cached images and files" but not the "Cookies and other site data" check box and then select Clear.
Of course, we are still happy to see you at the Help Desk if the need arises. But these troubleshooting techniques are worth keeping in your back pocket to pull out and apply when you have any issues with our site (or any other, for that matter). We sincerely believe that it is desirable, even fun, to keep learning about new ways to navigate confidently and independently in our online environment. Thanks for coming along with us!