Has anyone else lost the graphics on Fluther ?

Same here.

I thought I had them when I came on this morning; however upon seeing your Q, I realized that I’ve lost ALL the top graphics, but the bottom still is fine. Sometimes clearing your cache in your browser will help…sometimes NOT!!!

Slightly different on Desktop mode.

Mine are happily the same as usual.

That’s ‘cause penguins are special ! ^^^^

^^ Aww – did you know that penguins can blush?

Mine are fine – using my desktop.

Mine are fine on my tablet that is set to desktop mode.

Work well with me on mobile, not desktop.

Well, now they are gone. Did you jinx it, @Tropical_Willie??!!??

Nope . . . .

Yes. Some missing yesterday, all missing today. That’s on my laptop; on my tablet, they’re fine.

That’s weird. Mine are still ok.

Seems better now.

[Mod Says] Thanks for letting us know! We’ve contacted Ben, so it should be fixed in the next day or two.

^^ I just noticed this too. Fluther logo is missing at the top of the page and the buttons look weird.

Dr Jelly at the bottom left; is gone now !

Jelly at the top is back!!

All restored now. Thanks, Ben & mods.

Still not back, here.

Three days later & top & bottom are BOTH gone. I’m on a Win11 laptop. I cleared my cache this morning & that didn’t help. Patiently waiting!!!

Uh-oh, Dr. J is gone again. Also the stars in the lurve counts and the background block that makes the Q tags show up. Everything was fine a little while ago.

I don’t think I ever see Dr. J in the lower left. He’s at the top left.

This is on my laptop, with Firefox browser. Again, the Kindle tablet is fine, with Amazon’s Silk browser.

Fluther runs on more than one server, so my guess is that only one server has been reset so far. This would explain why some people have the graphics back, why some people don’t, and why @Jeruba was able to see them for a bit and then lost them again.

But again, this is just my best guess. Ben could show up at any second with a much better explanation.

Thanks @Ben and mods ! !

All working again .

Oooh, me too!!

Windows 7 with Chrome was apparently the way to go – my old desktop never lost a thing! lol

Day 5…everything came back!!! I’m using Firefox on Win11. I did notice while things were missing that my tab logo on Firefox had also disappeared. Fired up my laptop this morning & my tab logo was back. When I logged on to Fluther, everything was back to normal. :-) Don’t know if the tab logo & Fluther graphics were related, but it appeared to be YES!!! Thinking back, it all happened about the same time as a Firefox update. Firefox is chrome based if it makes any difference.

Ok again now.

@SavoirFaire, what causes them to disappear? Is something we can’t see also failing at the same time?

@Jeruba Assuming my guess about the underlying cause is correct: servers are like any other computer, which means they slow down if they are constantly processing information and never getting reset/restarted. But unlike most computers, servers need to stay running all the time so that the websites they host are always available. There’s a finite number of operations a computer can perform before they are running so slowly that they cannot process information fast enough to avoid timing out (basically, a safety valve that says “you’ve been running this process too long, abandon it before you crash”).

There’s various ways of mitigating this in between resets, one being to assign priorities to different processes. Decorative graphics are not essential to making a site function, so they tend to be given a lower priority. This is why losing the graphics is an early sign that the servers need to be reset. While the other processes are running normally because they have the normal amount of processing power assigned to them, graphics go missing because they are the first process to get shortchanged when there’s not enough processing power to go around.

With apologies to John Powell, whose explanation would have certainly been better, clearer, and much funnier.

@SavoirFaire, ah, thank you. That makes a lot of sense. They’re canaries, in a way.

(Dare I mention that some of them are missing again this evening?)

You honor his memory even without the punch lines.

@Jeruba Could you tell me which ones are missing for you? Also, have you tried clearing your cache (or at least your cookies) and restarting your browser? It’s possible that you are being served old data.

@SavoirFaire, Right now, nothing. But a little while ago it was the banner to the right of Dr. J, the icons next to General, etc., at the top, and the background that makes the tags show up.

Is this useful at all, or should I just keep still and wait?

I haven’t cleared anything. I’m always afraid I’ll lose something important. I don’t really know what’s in those things, like maybe saved options for certain sites and so on. Technochicken here.