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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘bug’
19.01.2023
When you’ve been saying the emperor has no clothes for the last few monthsâand on the emperor’s forumsâI shouldn’t be surprised we are at this point now.
Bing is virtually dead, and they don’t want me probing Bing Webmaster Tools (which are largely useless) about my own sites to show up even more of their BS.
As moves go, this is pretty daft. I mean, it was pretty useless before, so now I wonder how much more BS there is. I guess whomever is running Bing wants to confirm to me that Bing is dead along with the rest of it.
Tags: 2023, Bing, bug, bugs, Microsoft, search engine, technology
Posted in internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
27.08.2022
Bing is still very clearly near death, as this latest site: search shows.
It manages a grand total of 10 pages from Lucire, and as outlined before, some are pages that have not been linked to for 17 years.
I purposely updated some of the pages Bing had in its limited capacity, and strangely, those have disappeared! Bing doesnât want anything new, as it appears to be Microsoftâs Wayback Machine.
The fifth result here is a case in point. Some of you may recall lucire.com/about.shtml appearing in all the search engines, including Bing. This is a page last updated in 2004, with some final tweaks in 2012 (I assume for ad code; I donât recall). It was a page that I decided I would stick on to a new template, since the search engines loved it so much. I copied the text from our licensing site. And, for the sake of online archĂŠology, I put the 2004 page exactly as it was into a file called about-2004.shtml.
Bing must still be alive enough to spider and index the renamed page, but it rejects the revised about.shtml!
Itâs similar to what I wrote in mid-August when I updated other ancient pages from the early 2000s: Bing rejected them, including a frameset that now pointed at the latest page!
You may be thinking: obviously, you are doing something wrong with your newer code, Jack, for Bing to favour the old stuff. But look at the fourth result: itâs from 2020, the one ânewâ page that Bing has managed to index and show. I donât think we have anything wrong with our code if this page has made it in.
Google happily included the new about.shtml.
A search for Lucire itself on Bing now does include the home page, which is a new development in a search engine thatâs limping along. So much for the earlier claim that there were issues with the page that prevented it from appearing.
Tags: 2022, Bing, bug, Google, internet, JY&A Media, Lucire, Microsoft, publishing, search engine, search engines, technology, USA
Posted in internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
13.08.2022
Just trying to clear a few things off my hard drive. Here was one that was particularly curious when I was investigating what was going on with Bing: the files submitted by Cloudflareâs IndexNow. The theory: it would send Bing the newest accessed pages to add to the index. The reality: these are not new. In fact, these are ancient, many arenât even web pages (theyâre PDFs and web fonts). And sure enough, some did make it into the 10â55 pages that Bing is capable of indexing for Lucire these daysâitâs a very tiny index in reality, regardless of how many results it claims to have for a given search, as we discovered.
In other words, IndexNow, as I saw it implemented, is a total crock, and not worth the bother.
I wish these companies would test these things first, but we are talking Microsoft, where we’ve been doing the job as unpaid QA for decades.
It does get worse. Looking inside Bing Webmaster Tools, these (below) are the pages it says it has for Lucireâs root directory. I’ve alluded to how bad it was earlier, but upon going through these, the main index pages, which Bing always had till recently, are missing. The home page is also missing (although when I first started investigating in July, it was still there, which a friend can confirm; and the structure of it has not changed other than the removal of some links to 404s). All that’s left are pages from the early 2000s, plus entries for pages that have never existed. You can check these against the Wayback Machine, but we have never had pages in the main directory called nguoi-noi-tieng, arts-culture, podcast, form-single.html, archivi or cv-generator. Yet Bing believes these phantom pages exist. Well done, Microsoft, you can’t even get this right. This isn’t how spidering works.
Tags: 2022, bug, Cloudflare, internet, Microsoft, technology
Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
24.07.2022
MIA again on Bing: Lucireâs home page. The alt tags are not missing, with perhaps some exceptions for small logos. And not having an H1 tag is not fatal to other pages of ours that have been indexed. It remains bizarre.
After Holly Jahangiriâs very useful feedback to my previous post, I thought Iâd give the search engines she sampled a go for site:lucire.com.
Bear in mind that Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Qwant, Onesearch and Swisscows license from Bing, and Startpage picks up Google, so their indices will reflect the mothership.
Here’s how we look today. Bing remains well and truly beaten by Google, Mojeek, Baidu and Yandex.
Google: 6,100
Mojeek: 3,569
Swisscows: 498
Baidu: 201
Startpage: 198
Virtual Mirage: 100
Yandex: 94
Bing: 50
Qwant: 50
Duck Duck Go: 49
Ecosia: 49
Brave: 14
Searchencrypt: 8
Searx: 0
Onesearch: blocked in New Zealand
I am not alone, it seems. This thread on Microsoft Answers was enlightening. Others in the thread have found themselves gone from Bing (but not Google), and Microsoft appears to know about it, admitting to some fault and escalating the issues internally, but nothing ever gets done.
I had that old theory, blogged about previously, that computer databases get worn after a while. I saw that with Vox, a lot of Facebookâs ills can be put down to it, and maybe Bing has now got there? No tech ever wants to admit it because of how crazy it sounds. But if we can lose data on hard drives and USB sticks, then I donât care how many back-ups these big firms have, they are still fallible. (What if faults in one database are copied on to another, and the checksums werenât verified?)
I replied to the Microsoft poster, and itâs a pretty good summary so far:
Hi EbinVThomas, hereâs my experience, and Iâve run websites for three decades. The short version is I think Bing is stuffed and itâs not a Microsoft core business, so it doesnât get much love (indeed, one of their FAQ pages has a heading about âseachâ). I know the Microsoft fans will attack me for saying this, just as the Apple fans have a go at me when I say something negative about Macs, but I havenât read anything to change my opinion.
We started vanishing from Bing earlier this year, maybe about three months ago. For some of our sites, I thought it was our belated switch to HTTPS for some of them, but as youâll read, that wasnât the case.
These sites date from (at their present domains) 1995, 1997, 2002 and 2008, and they are well linked, well respected, and one has been winning awards from 1997 to today. Google and Mojeek have no problems with any of them. Two of the sites (the 2002 and 1995 ones) did drop from their number-one and two positions on Google (for a name search) when they switched to HTTPS but one has mostly recovered, the other (from 1995, with a lot of inbound links to HTTP) fluctuates.
One of the other sites uses Duck Duck Go for its internal site search (and has done since the 2010s), which is powered by Bing. Earlier this yearâsay about six weeks agoâI noticed that the internal search was getting more and more useless, even though I knew the articles used to be found by DDG.
I began doing site:domain.com searches for this one. It had c. 50 entries on Bing, down from several thousand earlier in the year.
My first reaction was to blame ourselvesâmaybe it was the full switch to a secure server (some earlier pages were already on HTTPS), or something else. We also began using Cloudflare again after a 12-year break around this time.
I signed up to Bing Webmaster Tools. The site promptly went down to 10 entries! In other words, signing up to Tools made the siteâs presence a lot, lot worse.
I found some weird site maps that I never put in, nor did any of my team. Nevertheless, I put in new, fresh ones last week, all pointing to HTTPS. Most of the pages have not been indexed.
I had to turn off Cloudflareâs IndexNow because it was sending some totally irrelevant and old pages and files to Bing. (So we can blame Cloudflare for some issues, but the majority still rests with Bing.)
Since the new site maps, Bing is now returning 53â5 entries (depending on the hour).
It finally included the home page which had been missing from the site: searches. Yet only yesterday Webmaster Tools said the page was not indexed because of certain issues, but it had been found in 2018. That made no sense as it was present until quite recently. Those issues included a description tag being too long (fine, I edited it), and no H1s (but why should there be? Not everyone wants humungous type on their page). But Bing had been fine historically with the page (since Bing started, so well before 2018) and it even appeared in the index during the last few weeks. A related page for our business doesnât have H1s, an even longer meta description, and itâs on Bing. (Itâs just not been entered into Webmaster Tools, which seems to be a kiss of death!)
Webmaster Tools even said it had accepted the site maps and the thousands of pages listed.
As far as I can make out, Webmaster Tools says one thing but reality says another.
So, was it Cloudflare and HTTPS that had knocked us? Well, no. Of the four sites I mentioned, we didnât change the set-up of the one started in 2008. Itâs a reference site, and has plenty of inbound links from Wikipedia since itâs fairly authoritative.
No Cloudflare, and still on HTTP. All fine on Google and Mojeek.
Also thousands of pages.
On Bing: 51 pages.
Thousands of entries have vanished since earlier this year, and Iâm going to hazard a guess to say it began happening around the time you wrote your original post.
It has had a slight impact on our traffic, especially since we had promoted Duck Duck Go so heavily since 2010 and encouraged others to shift from Google to it.
It seems that Bing can now only cope with 50-odd pages from certain sites. The older sites have fewer pages indexed now on Bing than they did on Excite or Hotbot in the 1990s, and certainly far fewer than Altavista! Our sites are so incredibly variedâstatic, dynamic, HTML, PHPâso it canât be structural or the way we have set things up. None have had issues at Google other than one that dropped in the index for a certain relevant search, and Mojeek is fine with them all and took the HTTPS shift for three of them in its stride.
These are such old sites with a history in Bing, so my feeling is that a new site wonât stand much of a chance.
This is a long way of confirming your original post: itâs not you, itâs them.
Tags: 2022, bug, Holly Jahangiri, Microsoft, search engine, search engines, technology
Posted in internet, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
08.05.2022
Last nightâs hour-waster was chatting to Facebook Business Support. No, thatâs unfair. I was actually assigned an incredibly good rep who took me seriously, and concluded that Facebook did indeed have a bug which means, of all the pages I can manage, the one for Lucire is alone in not allowing me, or any of its admins, to do anything. How coincidental, after losing Instagram and Twitter for periods during 2021.
Ironically, one editor canâof course someone who is supposed to have fewer privileges can do more. Such is Facebook.
A few things I learned. Thereâs a Meta Business Suite, which a whole bunch of pages got shoved into, whether you wanted it or not. My public page is there, for instance. It seems if you have Facebook and Instagram accounts for the same thing, youâre going to be in there.
Despite the two-factor authentication discussed in the previous post, I actually can get into the Business Suite, via another page I administer for a friend. From there I can get to Lucireâs tools.
I donât need two-factor authentication for any of the other pages in there, including my own, and have full access.
Trisha, or Trish as she said I could call her, walked me through the steps, and asked me to get to the Suite page. Then she asked me to click âCreate adâ, and I get this:
She asked me to check the account quality, and of course there are no issues:
She wrote: âThanks for letting me know. It’s weird because I have checked all your assets here and it looks good. But, here’s what I suggest, Jack. We’ll need to report this to our Internal team so they can investigate. You might experience a bug or glitch.â
I theorized: âJust so you know, this page dates back to 2007 so maybe it is so old that Facebookâs servers canât handle it?â
It wasnât something she responded to, as she stayed on-subject, but itâs a theory worth entertaining, as it wouldnât be the first time Iâve witnessed this.
So, for now, the one team member who can still go on Facebook for us posted this at my request:
I doubt theyâll ever fix it, and two years ago I did say I wouldnât really bother if Facebook went buggy and prevented us from updating again. Clearly I am bothering, as I know we have readers who use Facebook. But I have very little faith this will ever be fixed, since I have seen other reported bugs (some covered on this blog) get ignored for years, and this isn’t a fleeting bug, from what I can make out.
The lesson, as I have probably hinted at more than once, is never rely on a Big Tech service. The sites are so unwieldy that they get to a point where no one knows how to fix them. If earlier experiences are any indication, such as what I experienced at Vox, we have arrived at the end of Facebook pages.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, bug, bugs, Facebook, Lucire, publishing, social media, social networking
Posted in internet, publishing, technology | No Comments »
21.12.2021
With Lucireâs Twitter restoredâit was a huge distraction over the last two months with various automatic posting gadgets needing to be reprogrammed, and the Twitter-to-Mastodon cross-poster still does not work (itâs what happens when you modify things that are working perfectly well: itâs impossible to put them back)âwe wanted to get some of our social media back up to speed.
So letâs get back to rubbishing Facebook, shall we?
Because whenever we post, whether itâs through another program or directly on Facebook, the post just does not show on the page itself, unless youâre on the ultra-slow mobile edition (m.facebook.com) where youâre likely to give up before the posts begin to load. You have to wait many hours, even a day, for something to appear on the full-fat web version.
This reminds me of those days when our Facebook walls stopped updating on the 1st of each month, presumably because someone in Menlo Park had to flip a switch to tell the website that the new month had begun. And they wouldn’t do it till it hit midnight in California since everyone on the planet must live in the one time zone.
Whatâs the bet itâs a related glitch that existed at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, but we need to wait till midnight in California for Facebook to know it’s a new day?
Hereâs the mobile version (albeit viewed on the desktop) earlier on Tuesday:
And hereâs the web version, still unchanged 12 hours later, with the newest post after the pinned one from December 18.
Lesson: donât use Facebook if you wish to tell your audience something urgently. You are better off sending an email: theyâre more likely to see it in a timely fashion. And if your following isn’t that big, and you need your fans to know something urgently, it might actually be quicker to telephone them! Social mediaâforget it.
Tags: 2021, bug, Facebook, incompetence, marketing, social media, technology
Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
20.08.2021
One bug that creeps up at unpredictable intervals with InShotâs Music Playerâthough it is not as severe as the bug on Muzio Playerâis that after a while, it forgets that it should shuffle the tracks and resorts to alphabetical order, starting from the top.
Considering this isnât something that has affected any other music player, I find this very surprising.
These four screenshots were taken between July and August of the recent tracks. Thereâs no rhyme or reason the player would suddenly go to the top of the list, but when I begin hearing the same sequence of tracks, I know somethingâs not right. And it has been happening since I installed the player, though the first couple of times I didnât realize it was a bug.
I would tell Inshot directly but my last (highly positive) email went unanswered, so a public blog post is the next best thing, in case others have come across this bug.
With how forgetful computer programs are all the time, including the player I had on my phone prior to this, I wonder: should I invent the ini or preference file? It seems that in this universe, these havenât been invented yet!
On a side note, Meizu’s native music player has also forgotten to show the list of tracks, which remain linked after my herculean effort earlier this year. Its search still fails to scan the SD card.
Tags: 2021, bug, cellphone, Google Android, Meizu, music, quality control, software
Posted in design, technology | No Comments »
11.06.2021
I havenât been able to find anything on this bug online, but itâs very common.
As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple of CSS rules. The theme developer actually came in and helped us with a few modifications, which shows the extent to which he does follow-up for paying customers.
But there was one thing he was never able to crack, and I donât think itâs his fault, since it happens on a lot of websites, including Medinge Groupâs (also a theme I did not design, though I did earlier ones). On both these sites, there were no bolds and italics. There still arenât on Medingeâs.
There are <strong> and <em> codes in there, but the bolding and obliquing are done by the browser. The font files actually arenât loaded, so what we see are false bolds (the browser attempts to âoverprintâ the roman, duplicating the outline and shifting it marginally to give the illusion of a heavier typeface) and obliques, not italics (itâs the roman file pushed over 15 degrees or so). The former is particularly bad, as the outlines clash, and the result can be hollow glyphs, something that any font developer will know when one outline winds up accidentally on top of another in Fontographer or Fontlab.
These Wordpress themes rely on Google Fonts (another sin, in my opinion) so I donât know if the fault lies with Google or Wordpress, or the developer. If Wordpress does indeed power 70 per cent of websites, then I have to say the bug is awfully common, and I probably do see it on a very high percentage of visited sites.
The themes allow us to select the font family, but the selection only calls a single font file from the family.
Above: A graphic clipping text from Lucire Rouge that I sent to the developer.
The solution, as I discovered after months of toing and froing with Lucire Rougeâs theme dev, was to do your own font-linking rules in the CSS file and upload the fonts themselves to the relevant directory on the server. I must note publicly the âmonthsâ were not his fault, but due to my own delay. I should not expect computer programmers to be typographers, either.
It is something that one needs to watch out for, as the fake bolds and italics are horrible to look at, and must look amateur, even to the non-professional.
Above: Fixed at last by yours truly.
Tags: 2020, 2021, bug, computing, JY&A Media, Lucire Rouge, Medinge Group, publishing, typography, web design, web development, web fonts, website, Wordpress
Posted in design, internet, media, publishing, technology | No Comments »
19.05.2021
Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I donât know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day.
Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the network, which is what I should have stuck with.
Heck, even transferring a file using a USB stick would have been a better idea than OneDrive.
I hadnât signed up to it on my desktop PC. I went through the motions, used the default settings where it said it would back up documents and pictures (while making it clear my files would remain exactly where they were). I grabbed the file I needâthe entire 18 kilobytes of itâand thought nothing more. I deactivated OneDrive as I saw no real use for it any more.
Bad idea, because most of my desktop icons vanished, and my Windows default documentsâ and picturesâ folders were emptied out.
After reactivating OneDrive, I found the lot in the OneDrive folder, and promptly moved them back to their original folders. The desktop filesâthe text files I had on there plus the iconsâI duplicated elsewhere. Ultimately, I made new shortcuts for everythingâthank goodness my laptopâs icon layout is identical to my desktopâsâand restored the three text files from their duplicate directory.
The above took me all of a few minutes to write but in reality I spent an hour fixing thisâsomething that Windows said would not happen.
Chalk it up to experienceâconsider this fair warning to anyone who thinks of using âthe cloudâ.
Also in the âsay one thing, do anotherâ file for yesterday: I attempted to sign in to my Flickr account, which has not been touched since around 2008. I tried a range of addresses I had in 2006, when I originally signed up, and attempted to do password resets. Flickr: âInvalid email or password.â I even tried an address that Yahoo! emailed me at in 2018 concerning Flickr, and which Flickr itself said might be the correct email (use your Yahoo! username and add â@yahoo.comâ to the end of it).
I had no other option but to email their support, and mentioned that I was a paying Smugmug customer, given that the photo site now owns Flickr.
They have responded in a timely fashion, not telling me the email I had used, but said they had sent it a password reset in there.
Surprisingly (or maybe not, considering we are talking about another big US site again), the address was indeed one of the ones I had tried (Iâm glad I kept a record). Except now it worksâwhatâs the bet that post-enquiry, they fixed things up in order to send me that reset email?
I thanked the support person for the reset email, but suggested that they had some bugs, and fixing them would mean less for him to do.
Don Marti linked an interesting article in The Drum in which he was quoted. Duck Duck Go, Firefox and Github have all opposed Googleâs new FLOC tracking method. Meanwhile, Bob Hoffman points out that only four per cent of Apple users have opted in to tracking after the Cupertino companyâs new OS opted you out by default.
Most of the time, people tell me that they find targeted ads âcreepyâ as they appear from site to site, so itâs no wonder that take-up has been so low with Apple users. So if not FLOC, then what?
Well, hereâs a radical idea: show ads on sites that have subject-matter relevant to the advertiser. Itâs what happened before Googleâs monopoly, and there were plenty of smaller ad networks that did a great job of it. The prices were still reasonable, and Google wasnât taking a big cut of the money earned. Of course Big Tech doesnât like it, because they wonât earn as much, and the old system actually required people with brains to figure out how best to target, something creepy tracking has tried to replace.
The old methods, with their personal touch, resulted in some creative advertising workâI remember we had some page takeovers on Lucireâs website where the traditional header was redesigned to show off the R55 Mini, thanks to one of our earlier ad directors, Nikola McCarthy. No tracking involved, but a great brand-builder and a fantastic way for Mini to get a fashion connection. Ads with tracking are so transactional and impersonal: âBuy this,â or, âYouâve searched for this. Buy this.â
I doubt it does the brands much good, and before you say that that doesnât matter, let me also add that it canât do the humans much good, either. The userâs purpose is reduced to clicking through and buying; so much for building a relationship with them and understanding their values. That isnât marketing: itâs straight selling. Which means the marketing departments that put these deals together are doing themselves out of a job. Theyâre also spending money with a monopoly that, as far as I have read, doesnât have independently certified metrics, which 20 years ago would have been a concern with some agencies.
I do like innovations, but every now and then, I feel the newer methods havenât done us much good. Tracking is tracking, no matter what sort of jargon you use to disguise it.
Tags: 2000s, 2021, advertising, Aotearoa, Apple, BMW, Bob Hoffman, bug, bugs, Don Marti, Flickr, Google, JY&A Media, Lucire, marketing, media, Microsoft, Mini, New Zealand, privacy, publishing, Smugmug, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
05.01.2021
I have to say Iâm impressed with NewTumbl as they responded to my Tweets about potential censorship and post moderation.
I think they will allow me to share a few points.
First, they took me seriously. The fact they even bothered to look into it is well beyond what Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and Google would normally do, and Iâm talking about Yahoo in 1999. They also answered every point I made, rather than gloss over or ignore some. Out of their thousands or myriads of users, they were actually good enough to deal with me one on one.
Secondly, they assure me thereâs no censorship of the kind I suspected but think a temporary bug could have been behind Mbiiâs inability to see my posts. They will delete illegal content, and that is the extent of it.
Thirdly, if I may be so bold as to say this one, my understanding of the postsâ levels is correct and those moderators who objected to my content are incorrect.
I wonât reveal more than that as some of the content refers to future actions.
Iâve said I could put a toe in the water again over at NewTumbl, and, âI really appreciate you taking this seriously and certainly it all helps encourage me to return.â
Being honest and up front really helps.
The one thing preventing me from heading back in a flash is Iâve become rather used to adding to the gallery here. Weâll see: I felt it was âNo way, JosĂ©â a month ago (although I always maintained a ânever say neverâ positionâI mean, itâs not Google Plus) and now itâs more âThe jury is out.â At the least I might pop by more regularly to see what’s in my feed.
Tags: 2020, 2021, bug, censorship, customer service, NewTumbl, transparency, USA
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 9 Comments »
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