#1: Nancy Snyder (naneki) on Aug 18, 2008

Lately every time I try to create a puzzle it freezes up on me. I can restart firefox and navigate through all the other areas on this site, but when I go back to create a puzzles, I can enter the size then as it tries to go to the puzzles editor...nothing!

Can you help me?

well I'm not sure if you did anything but I was able to slowly create a puzzle. I started with 10x10, saved & increased it in multitudes of ten there after

Odd. The puzzle creation code hasn't changed in months. I have no idea what this might be.

Now it won't let me edit puzzles that I'm working on..it just freezes & says "web paint by number is not responding"

Could it be firefox? though I haven't had this problem is the past, or could it be that too many others are using the puzzle editor?

I'm just throwing out thoughts...it it very puzzling!
(no pun intended)

"not responding" could just be that the server has hung again. It's been doing that occasionally. Lousy ISP.

lol...I am a patient soul, I'll get them done sooner or later :)

I don't have the trouble of freezing up but I am still having the problem of moving up and down or side to side using Windows side and bottom bar. On every other site I have no problem moving the bars as little or as much as I want. However, on this site they won't move by grapping on to them. I either have to use page up and down (no side to side), or I have to double click on the arrows at the top and bottom of the bar and then the window jumps about an inch. It makes working on puzzles larger than 40x40 almost impossible. Any ideas of how to fix this?

I've been having the same problem, but only when I'm using the new version. I'll use the old one for as long as it's available, but I don't know what I'll do after that...

I'm trying to figure out the bug reported in responses #7 and #8 here, in which it seems to be impossible to scroll by dragging the scroll bars. BlackCat seems to be using IE 8, and haesselmaas seems to be using IE 7. I've tried reproducing that in IE 7, but failed. Are other people experiencing this problem? Any clues on how I can reproduce it?

I've fixed some bugs that might have had something to do with the IE scrolling bug. But since I was never able to reproduce it, I'm not sure if I actually fixed it.

I have found that the puzzle editor generally loads very, very slowly. I think it's Firefox, not the server, because I get an hourglass cursor in all Firefox windows while other apps work normally. It's not really a problem, since it just takes a little patience (so far it's never actually frozen up), but I'm wondering is this normal? Or do I need a Firefox upgrade or something? I'm using 3.0.11.

I'm using Firefox 3.0.11 and most of the time the editor loads quickly. Sometimes it will take up to 20 seconds but that is rare.

The basic Javascript code for drawing puzzle grids has gone through about four major rewrites in the history of this site. The editor only got about half the changes from the last rewrite. I'm currently feeling like it's fallen behind a bit and needs some up grades, but most of the ones I have planned are feature related rather than performance related. Maybe I need to do some profiling.

There is currently more server-side computation for generating the edit pages than the play pages. Maybe the server is slow sometimes.

Javascript is client side, right? What do you use for the server side, out of curiosity?

Server side is mostly Perl, but where I wanted really good performance, I did things in C. Right now that's the pbnsolve program that is used to "check" puzzles in the puzzle creation environment and the back end of the "chat" program. The database is MySQL.

I still can't scroll except by leaps of about 10 squares. I find that I don't even try anything much over 40x40 because it is just too irritating to have to jump around so much. Has anyone else had this trouble?

I tried reproducing that under IE a while ago, but couldn't. I need more info.

my computer has started "ending program" when I am in the middle of puzzles. It first happened on the homophones puzzles but now seems to happen any time I am on a while. It's as if there is a time limit. It has happened relatively quickly lately. Very frustrating to be "half way through and then a "close program' box comes up. Can anyone help?

Hi, Marjorie. I'm a newly registered user, although I've been lurking for a long time and am addicted to this site and have solved hundreds of puzzles. I'm finding that, although I don't get a "close program" box, my connection terminates and then reconnects, but, of course, at that point all of my work has been lost. I'm running Windows XP Home SP3 with Internet Explorer 8. All of this has just started in the last few weeks.

Me again. I just wanted to share some new information on the "timing out" thing. I tried a random puzzle today and was disconnected after about 20 minutes, but this time I did see the dialogue window: "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem with this web page" and has re-established connection to this tab. (I'm embarrassed to say that I remember the first part of the dialogue but not the last part - sorry about that.) I'm wondering if this is an IE 8 issue?

Has anyone tried Chrome yet? I just started using it today, and I must say that this site runs very fast with Chrome. I loaded a 99x99 puzzle that I had previously saved in less than 10 seconds. And it loaded the whole saved solution unlike Firefox or IE. I'll continue to use this for a few days, but so far it seems great.

Mine has started freezing, too. I notice that the problem isn't as bad on the right side of the screen. It's also not as bad at the bottom. What can I do?

Angela, take Gator's suggestion and start using Chrome browser for this site. I now use it for just about all my Internet. It's faster and more friendly to the webpbn programs. Very simple, lots of cool background choices, very safe.

Download it from Google here:

http://www.google.com/chrome

I've started using Chrome as well and am mostly happy with it. I'm not thrilled that Google uses it to collect information about my internet habits. It doesn't have a good java plug in either so I can't use it to play the games I used to on Yahoo or to view the looping radar at the National Weather Service. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have the vulnerabilities that IE has - the main reason I switched and use it for my primary browser. I do keep IE on my machine to do the things Chrome has trouble with.

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