Forum Home Page Turns Black....

Gene Steinberg

Well-known member
OK, this is a challenge. I have filed a support ticket, but never got a response that helps me.

Here's the deal.

I converted one of our forums, forum.technightowl.com, from vB4 to XenForo. I have more or less carried over some of the styling options from that forum to this one, but made 99% of the changes under styles. There are two or three template changes, most significantly for the header meta tags and the copyright notices in the footer.

I have also placed three sets of banner ads on the forum, and added maybe a dozen or so add-ons that impact board messages, global feeds, and some other odds and ends.

So here's the problem:

With Safari on a recent iMac running 10.7.1, when I leave the forum home page open and switch to another tab, after a few minutes, the page turns black, except for the banners. Note that these are the same banners that ran under the vB forum. A fast refresh fixes it. I cannot duplicate the problem in the latest releases of Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

I have NOT seen this phenomenon on any other XenForo forum, just mine. I'd like some guidance as to what's going on and what, other than removing the banner blocks (we get paid for them so that's not an option).

Screen Shot 2011-09-30 at 2.14.01 PM.webp

This is also important to me in another way. I have two more forums, one with nearly 120,000 messages, that I'd like to move over after your 1.1 version ships, but they will also be similarly styled, so we need to address this problem first.
 
If you disable the adverts do you experience the same issue? The same with your other addon's I would suggest disabling each one by one to try and find the cause...
 
I can try the add-ons. The ad blocks cannot be killed. They are part of our income stream, and we have contracts with the ones that aren't AdSense or otherwise syndicated. If there's another way to code them, of course, fine. But the AdSense is just the standard Google code, so it's not as if that can be changed. It's an AdSense ad that you are seeing displayed.
 
I am not suggesting killing them permenantly just suggesting disabling them one by one and seeing if you can find one that is conflicting... even though it is default adsense code it may still be conflicting with something else, if you find that is works without adsense but also find it works without one of your modifications then you know it was actually a conflict between both that caused your problem...

Simply put with these sort of issues it is a case of trial and error, the only real way to find the cause is to eliminate each possible option first!
 
I've a similar problem on xf.com, and other sites when using Safari, when there are tabs I've not visited in a while. I click on another tab and then back at the first tab with which had the problem - so far that fixes it.
 
I understand, Dean. I'm on it now. Curious: I disabled all plug-ins, but the one for [GP] Donations, which never appeared before, suddenly turned up, even though it was technically not enabled. Regardless, I'll report the results, so others can use it for something or other :)
 
I don't want to say this, but I just had it happen with THIS forum. Never saw that before, but I usually don't keep the screens open near as often. So I'm back to the beginning.
 
I don't want to say this, but I just had it happen with THIS forum. Never saw that before, but I usually don't keep the screens open near as often. So I'm back to the beginning.
I don't think you are back at the beginning.. It is a Safari issue as far as I can tell. It seems to have many issues e.g. the process 'Safari Web Content' seems to be a bit out of control after a short time.
 
It's a problem with Safari. It started happening to me on this site the day I upgraded to Lion (and therefore Safari 7).

It appears to keep a placeholder of a page using the true background colour, which on this site is actually black, to accommodate the super-footer.
 
One more thing: Anyone who is using Safari and has this problem, should choose Report Bugs to Apple... from the Safari menu, fill in the information, and use More Options to upload source to Apple. One person can't make a difference, but a few dozen will. As a tech writer, I do have Apple contacts and, if you folks help, I'll send this on to them to see if they have any solutions. Obviously, you guys want to be Mac friendly. :)
 
It's a problem with Safari. It started happening to me on this site the day I upgraded to Lion (and therefore Safari 7).

It appears to keep a placeholder of a page using the true background colour, which on this site is actually black, to accommodate the super-footer.
I'm experiencing this problem here and on my test forums now. I just go to any page on the forum, go to another browser tab, return to the forum, and the screen is completely black. When I scroll, the black is gone. Not every time, some occasions.

Safari 5.1.1
OS X 10.6.8
XenForo 1.1.0 Beta 2
 
A Safari related issue, which I have reported to Apple. But it may not be anything they would want to deal with, in which case, XF would have to see if they can find out why, and do their own workaround.
 
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