Trouble With Freep Site...Anyone Else?

**gnome** · October-13-09, 06:13 AM

For the second day in a row, when I go to Freep.com the page layout is straight out of crazyville. Large strange fonts advertising links to everything from CareerBuilder to Petfinder to forclosure listing ... clutter up the left side of the screen and overlap the stories.

If I click on a story the same thing happens with the crazyville fonts over the top of the article.

Is anyone else having this same experience or is this a case of Gnome Alone?

**wazootyman** · October-13-09, 06:18 AM

This has been happening to me occasionally for weeks. I've tried reloading the page - but it doesn't seem to help. Usually if I come back to the site a while later it has fixed itself.

Surprising that such a major problem has gone on this long.

**Meddle** · October-13-09, 06:18 AM

Been working for me, but I have a crapload of adblockers in place to so all the stuff is killed off.

The DetNews site for me though is unusable due to their coding.

**sirrealone** · October-13-09, 06:38 AM

I use Firefox with the AdBlock Plus plugin and it blocks all of the popups and sidebar ads.

**Neilr** · October-13-09, 07:55 AM

Several weeks ago the same thing happened to me. I also tried reloading to no avail. After several days it just cleared up.

**EMG** · October-13-09, 07:59 AM

As of right now, I can access both the Free Press and News sites with no problem.

**texorama** · October-13-09, 08:05 AM

Happens to me only with Firefox, where I have the adblocking turned on. I have a copy of Safari loaded, with no adblocking, and I've noticed that if I use that, the site works fine.

**gnome** · October-13-09, 08:57 AM

Attachment 3508

I'm running explorer 8

**SCS100** · October-13-09, 09:22 AM

I've had that happen quite frequently. If you want to get rid of it, move your mouse over the icons on the top [[News, Classifieds, etc.) and they will go away. The format will still be messed up, but at least you can read the text now. Only problem is, every time you go to a new page, you have to do it again.

**ndavies** · October-13-09, 10:14 AM

This is happening because the formatting for the page is cached seperately from the words on the page. The formatting was changed for the current new page, however your browser is using the old cached version of the formatting.

You'll need to figure out how to refresh the cached data that's being used. For windows explorer there's an option under tools/internet options/ to check the webpages for changes on every access. Most browser don't check the formatting everytime it's loaded in order to speed load times.

**MarkSmith** · October-13-09, 10:41 AM

Hey, everyone.

My name is Mark Smith and I'm a Web editor at the Free Press.

This problem is a result of a bad cache file in your browser. You can fix it by emptying your cache. The easiest way to do that on most browsers is to hold down the shift key and hit the refresh button.

Let me know if that doesn't work.

**gnome** · October-13-09, 01:20 PM

Thanx Mark,

I first tried the "shift + refresh" trick... didn't work. So I went into "history" folder and deleted all temporary files and cookies ... then hit "shift +refresh" and everything came back from crazyville.

Thanx for everyones' great suggestions. And welcome to the forum, MarkSmith.

**Lowell** · October-13-09, 03:51 PM

BTW, I like the Iphone / WAP site. Browser sniffer works nicely to send one directly to the site while offering linkage to the full site. The small screen site has nice flow and navigation.

**dc313** · October-14-09, 08:05 AM

They don't want us to buy the paper yet three days later the site is still distorted. Way to go FP.

**catch22** · October-14-09, 09:57 AM

Originally Posted by MarkSmith

Hey, everyone.
This problem is a result of a bad cache file in your browser. You can fix it by emptying your cache. The easiest way to do that on most browsers is to hold down the shift key and hit the refresh button.

That's the short-term fix. The permanent fix would be to fix the screwed-up code on the server that makes this happen. I'm not holding my breath.

**sirrealone** · October-15-09, 06:34 AM

Originally Posted by catch22

That's the short-term fix. The permanent fix would be to fix the screwed-up code on the server that makes this happen. I'm not holding my breath.

But that might make it so a pop-up ad doesn't come up with every single page load

**gnome** · October-15-09, 07:41 AM

Personally, I appreciate MarkSmith coming here and taking the time to answer my query. And as far as short-term-fixes go, hmm, it seems life is an endless series of short-term-fixes.