I added two new features to the site recently...
Automatic determining of embedded image sizes
The Wiki has now a feature that checks the image sizes and adds the appropriate width= and height= tags into the page source code. This avoids the scrolling issues.
However, this has a downside: For the width and height to be known, the server must actually download the image referred by the page source code, before it can send the page to the browser for viewing.
If the location of the image is slow or unresponsive, that unresponsiveness directly translates to the actual page as well. The sizes are cached, so such unresponsiveness shouldn't happen
every time, but it might happen.
There are always costs. :(
For clarification: Yes, this applies to
all images embedded on submission and on article pages, including those which you hotlink from Imageshack or whatever site you happen to use.
Edit 2: I also tried to retroactively update all submission forum posts to share this feature, but it didn't work out. For the changes to take effect on the forums, someone has to manually edit+save the submission once.
Edit 3: If the image is changed but the URL remains intact, the changes are updated on the pages within six hours (i.e. the cache expiry time is 6 hours). If the image is inaccessible at that time, it will be tried again not earlier than after a minute.
Edit 4: If the image host shuns Wget, no size information can be acquired.
Page excerpts for referrer lists.
For example, now
http://tasvideos.org/ref.exe?page=TODO actually shows what is the TODO where it is being linked from.
and also…
I upgraded the Memcache version of PHP.
Hopefully this fixes finally the bug where a message "marked server localhost:11211 as failed" appears randomly on the pages without an actual cause.
