Why do websites develop glitches?

Excessive heat F’s up computers.

The code gets jumbled by an event that was not anticipated?

A lot can happen to cause it. Cosmic rays to ants and everything in between. Memory failures is one of the largest reasons. Any memory storage device you have is slowly dying every time you use it.

If it’s happening to a number of users of the site, on various platforms and devices, and not to any one person, it’s not going to be a matter of wear and tear on one person’s computer.

@Blackwater_Park, does your current Fluther page (this one) look normal? Page header and tab graphics present, side panel graphics present, small graphics such as the “Flag” flag showing, colors as usual, topic tags legible? Not so on mine and others’. Please see the page that @Hawaii_Jake referenced, here.

If I were trying to debug this, given the evidence so far, I think I might be looking for something that changed or overwrote one or more values in a graphics address array, or anyway something like that.

I know from my sons that as new operating systems and browser versions come out, software has to be tweaked to operate with the new updates. There’s constant reprogramming and debugging to be done.

It is strange in this instance, that the glitches that folks are finding are not tied to one system or kind of hardware.

Cyberattack by the Russians? This is a JOKE!

Websites operate through three sets of code cooperating with each other.

The website’s code (a combination of HTML, CSS, maybe some JavaScript and PHP).

The server-side code. A server is where the site lives which publishes out to the web.

And the browser code. A browser is software the end user uses to access the web and the specific website, which we navigate to via the site’s URL. Common wen browsers today include Chrome and Safari.

Updates and changes to code in any of those three, either on purpose or by accident, will cause problems including with the site acting buggy.

Computer code, and HTML (web code) and related languages are only as good as the programmers and web developers who put them together. And they’re usually assembling web oages using multiple different technologies (and generations of technologies) in a single site.

The webmaster is acting sort of like a general contractor does when building a house.

Which means that he/she has a good overall picture of how things are supposed to work in the end, but not how every sub- and sub-piece of technology is woven together.

Exceptions happen: bad data, unanticipated actions by the users, as well as mundane things like disk crashes and power outages.

The web is a fragile and intricate mechanism. I’m suprised things don’t break more often.

@Jeruba The memory in servers and internal comms that bring you these pages

Sometimes they aren’t good at programing or so they can charge subscribers extra to “fix glitches”.

From my programming experience. Some numbers have a finite roof for a value. When that number is passed, like 256, 62326, 2000, you get a glitch.

@RedDeerGuy1, as I recall, one of those magic numbers is 32767.

In the late 1990s through early 2000’s, most websites were bug-free.
Then Millenials came along. And (right or wrong) it was determined that Millenials don’t care about bugs, don’t care about customer service, and just want websites to be “simple”.

There are infinite possibilities on why websites glitch or act differently than they are supposed to. From Hardware to software to any of the numerous pieces of equipment and code that your browser traverses to get to and from the site.
This kind of stuff has paid my bills my entire life.

@Jeruba – 32767 is just under 2^15 (in binary, it’s fifteen 1’s). If 15 bits are allocated to the number, then adding 1 to 32767 results in fifteen 0’s (not 32768)! Aak!

@RocketGuy, thanks, that rings a bell. I think it’s probably somewhere in my Black Hole of Forgotten Things.

I’m a software developer, and the answer to that question is about like asking for all the ways a car can break.

A website is an application delivered to a third party generic client know as your ‘browser’ that we as programmers have little control over. HTML, javascript, css, all have to come together in a seamless team to make the site work and look as intended. And that’s actually way harder than it sounds as the website becomes more complex and experiences more load.

The website could have vulnerabilities due to bad code, bad data, network instability, or any number of other reasons. If devs were perfect, the code would protect against every possible vulnerability…but we’re not perfect, and we often have less time/resources to test and hone everything than alot of other industries get to perfect their products.