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Missing image sorry about that. We're working on it.


DanPan

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This seems to be a new function in the cachepages. After loading the page, a javascript function tests to see if all images are loaded correctly. If they are not, the image is replaced with the 'Missing image'-image.

After a further investigation this mostly seems to be caused by servers that are not IPv6 ready, and cannot deliver the picture to someone who accesses the internet with IPv6. Since the original image-link is replaced with the 'missing image'image, it is very difficult to determine what origional picture was supposed to be loading.

It would be nice if the original url would be copied to the alt-tag or title-tag, so we can better see where the image is coming from.

Also the text 'we are working on it' is very misleading, since most of the time grundspeak could not really do anything about it.

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It would be nice if the original url would be copied to the alt-tag or title-tag, so we can better see where the image is coming from.

Also the text 'we are working on it' is very misleading, since most of the time grundspeak could not really do anything about it.

Wow, thanks for pointing this out. That's really bad. Normally I support whatever they do to get around problems, but messing with links that have nothing to do with them is a inappropriate overreaction to the problem they do have with images they lost from their own database. I've been seeing these images for days thinking they were just artifacts of the pictures GC lost. It was only when you brought it up that I checked and realized the missing images could be from anywhere. But I also noticed that the correct links make it through when I look at the HTML source, so at least there's some way to recover that information.

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That image is not available at the URL you specify in your cache description.

 

Which may or may not be your fault.

 

For instance, I get that same thing when I look at any cache page from work when the image is hosted at Photobucket (and other sites). Those sites are blocked at work, so from home (and pretty much anywhere else) they are fine.

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This message has popped up on one of my cached pages, GC4MRRV Magnetic Illumination. It appeases after each image on the page. all the images seem to be there and visible. The image files are still listed on the cache page and visible in the gallery. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

 

Thanks

 

Paul

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This message has popped up on one of my cached pages, GC4MRRV Magnetic Illumination. It appeases after each image on the page. all the images seem to be there and visible. The image files are still listed on the cache page and visible in the gallery. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

 

Thanks

 

Paul

 

You will see those placeholder images anytime you have HTML code that is trying to retrieve images that cannot be found. (I have already told our dev team that the text on the image needs to change, as it misleadingly implies that the issue is always on Groundspeak's side of things.)

 

In this case, you had bad HTML in your cache description that included a couple instances if "<img />", which is telling the server to retrieve an image without providing a source. I removed those tags and the placeholder images no longer display.

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You will see those placeholder images anytime you have HTML code that is trying to retrieve images that cannot be found. (I have already told our dev team that the text on the image needs to change, as it misleadingly implies that the issue is always on Groundspeak's side of things.)

It's misleading, and it also loses information, since when the site displays that message, it suppresses any knowledge of the original URL. Sometimes I can tell what's wrong with a URL or where an image might have moved, but when the system replaces it with the URL to that MissingImage image, I no longer see the original URL.

 

And what's particularly irksome is that often when I track down the original URL by looking at the page source, I can, in fact, read the image just fine. If the geocaching.com had just sent the original URL to me and allowed my browser to look for it, everything would have worked.

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This message has popped up on one of my cached pages, GC4MRRV Magnetic Illumination. It appeases after each image on the page. all the images seem to be there and visible. The image files are still listed on the cache page and visible in the gallery. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

 

Thanks

 

Paul

 

You will see those placeholder images anytime you have HTML code that is trying to retrieve images that cannot be found. (I have already told our dev team that the text on the image needs to change, as it misleadingly implies that the issue is always on Groundspeak's side of things.)

 

In this case, you had bad HTML in your cache description that included a couple instances if "<img />", which is telling the server to retrieve an image without providing a source. I removed those tags and the placeholder images no longer display.

 

Again thank you Moun10bike for your prompt assistance.

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And what's particularly irksome is that often when I track down the original URL by looking at the page source, I can, in fact, read the image just fine. If the geocaching.com had just sent the original URL to me and allowed my browser to look for it, everything would have worked.

It WAS send to your browser. There is a Javascript addition on the page, that checks all images on the page after the page has loaded. If an image is not loaded, the complete link is replaced with the 'missing image'.

So somehow your browser was not able to read the image; sometimes a simple refresh of the page will get it loaded correctly.

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It WAS send to your browser. There is a Javascript addition on the page, that checks all images on the page after the page has loaded. If an image is not loaded, the complete link is replaced with the 'missing image'.

So somehow your browser was not able to read the image; sometimes a simple refresh of the page will get it loaded correctly.

Wow, that's even more complicated than I imagined. Why doesn't it just leave it to my browser to display broken images the way it wants to? I'd never thought of reloading the page: I can see that the image URL points to the MissingImage picture, so why would I expect it to change on a reload? It sure seems like someone is imagining a problem and then over thinking the solution.

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"you had bad HTML in your cache description"

 

[Edited] It worked just fine before, and now GS has crippled A LOT of puzzles and associated content. And this is what we get for our Premium membership? It's Broke - Bye. See Ya.

 

No how to? No here's what happened and how to fix it?!

 

Were this a for=profit site the stakeholders would be coming unglued... oh. wait.

Edited by Keystone
Removed potty language.
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There were some images lost last August-September, but we recovered 90% of them. At that time, we implemented the "we're working on it" placeholder image that appears whenever an image cannot be retrieved by a cache description. If you are seeing this image, it means that you are viewing a listing that had one of the lost images, or the HTML in the cache description is trying to retrieve a non-existent image, either because of incorrect HTML formatting or because the image is no longer available at the indicated source. In the case above, the user had incorrect img tags in his HTML.

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This image is coming up in ways unrelated to missing images from our own servers (which is very rare). I'm looking into it.

Indeed, I have seen this phenomenon a few times. See my post #12

 

When this happens at that moment loading of the avatars is also very slow.

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And what's particularly irksome is that often when I track down the original URL by looking at the page source, I can, in fact, read the image just fine. If the geocaching.com had just sent the original URL to me and allowed my browser to look for it, everything would have worked.

It WAS send to your browser. There is a Javascript addition on the page, that checks all images on the page after the page has loaded. If an image is not loaded, the complete link is replaced with the 'missing image'.

So somehow your browser was not able to read the image; sometimes a simple refresh of the page will get it loaded correctly.

 

I noticed this on a cache page today, but when I viewed the source (something I have not needed to do since the Browser Wars of the 1990s) and tried to fetch the image separately, the image was 404-compliant. If it was not for the interfering Javascript I would have seen a broken image, which is the normal way Firefox indicates an image could not be loaded.

 

Please can content providers not meddle with the behaviour of people's browsers.

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This image is coming up in ways unrelated to missing images from our own servers (which is very rare). I'm looking into it.

 

I think Moun10Bikes comment is useful. He suggests that the "missing image" image that is display suggests the image which can't be found is on the GS site. A specific case that I discovered a couple of days ago occurred when the geocheck.org site (which is used by many puzzle caches for coordinate verification) was down. I was working on some puzzles which had 20 different instances of the coordinate checker image and all of them rendered the "missing image" image. I suppose the site could check the host name of the image URL and render a different image when it's one that is hosted externally but I think that most users have encountered sites with missing images on other sites and recognize the default browser behavior when it encounters a missing image. As it is, the message is sort of misleading as it implies that it's something that you can work on to fix. In the case of images hosted at coordinate checker sites, or one of the many image hosting services there really isn't anything that you can do about it.

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As of today it should now show a broken image instead of the JavaScript error message.

 

The image slowdown issue occurred recently when we removed the database bottleneck (to scale for the summer). We upgraded the memory on the image server which should help but we're working on a more permanent solution.

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