SpielByWeb

Dickster · Joined: 12 Oct 06 Posts: 6

I love Reef Encounter, and love playing it on SpielByWeb. However, ever since I first started playing it here, I've had problems getting Actions 4 and 5 to work properly. Any time I try to place or move a shrimp, I get several "Input Error--Please Retry" messages. The little finger-pointer reverts to being a regular arrow-shaped cursor, the little plus signs on the polyps disappear, and I have to cancel the action and do it again...and again...and again...

The placements and movements I'm attempting are perfectly legal, and the little plus signs show up where they should, showing me my placement & movement options. But when I click on the plus sign, the screen quickly refreshes with the Input Error message. Heck, it's not even like I'm actually "inputting" anything; I'm just clicking on my mouse button!

Every other action in the game works just fine for me, but these two are driving me crazy, sometimes requiring me to cancel them out and attempt them again five or six times before they finally work properly. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Can anything be done about it?
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HappyProle · Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 2:55 am Post subject:

What browser (include version) and OS are you using? Please include any browser extensions you may have installed.

Dickster · Joined: 12 Oct 06 Posts: 6

spearjr · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:58 am Post subject:

This should fix most of your problems:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Dickster · Joined: 12 Oct 06 Posts: 6

Oh sure, just change browsers, that's all! Nothing to it! I'll just dump the browser I've been using for 15 years--not to mention one of the most popular ones going--so I can visit this one web site more efficiently!

Why didn't I think of that?
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Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish!

RyanMC · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 7:36 pm Post subject:

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Dickster · Joined: 12 Oct 06 Posts: 6

Did I misunderstand something, Ryan? The link I followed led me to a site where I could download an entirely different browser. Was that not the intention of posting that link?

I was rather hoping that there was some AOL setting I could adjust, or that you guys were asking about my browser and OS software because you needed that information in order to de-bug something. So when I followed the link and it led me to a download site for an entirely different browser, it smacked of "dude, get a real browser."

The last I heard, AOL was still one of the more popular browsers that folks used. As such, I assumed that SpielByWeb worked fairly hard to accommodate its AOL-using members. So I was a bit dumbfounded by the "just dump AOL" reply.

If that was not the intent of that link, I apologize, but I don't see how else I might have been meant to take it.
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Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish!

spearjr · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 7:08 am Post subject:

grid · Joined: 08 Jan 07 Posts: 7 Location: Minneapolis, MN

Lets see... fifteen years ago was 1992. There were a few prototype web browsers out there, but NCSA hadn't yet released Mosaic, which was the browser that first popularized the concept. (That would be released the next year, in 1993.)

I'm not entirely sure when AOL added web browsing to its list of "features", but I was able to find a citation that said it started to offer usenet access in 1994, so I'd imagine web browsing wasn't terribly long after that.

Still, popularity should never be confused for excellence. AOL has been the bane of web developers since the very beginning, and AOL users have always had to suffer through poor browser rendering, with the possible exception of the years when AOL attempted to include a hacked version of netscape for its users. As I recall, that didn't last very long, and they quickly switched to the then superior IE5.

HappyProle · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 9:47 am Post subject:

From what I could gather, AOL 9.0's browser is based on IE 6. Still, it would be difficult for me to test everything we develop on AOL 9.0. I'm just not going to install it on my machine....

I'd be more than happy to help you troubleshoot your errors, but keep in mind that I'm completely unfamiliar with the AOL browsing experience. My guess is that there are some "security" or "fast browsing" settings that are screwing you up. We've had issues before with people using browser add-ons that cache pages in an attempt to speed up performance.

gische · Joined: 12 Oct 05 Posts: 186 Location: San Carlos, CA

I think it's a really poor use of this site's development time to worry about porting to a web browser that is used by a tiny fraction of the internet population.

freduk · Joined: 18 Jan 06 Posts: 433 Location: Bristol, UK

Dickster - most of the replies here are from other users, not 'official' SBW people. So please bear that in mind.
Having said that, I have to agree with the consensus that says get off AOL. They do a really good marketing job of persuading people to use them, but they are lousy at browsers. If this is the first site you've had problems with, then you've been very lucky.
If you don't want to use Firefox, then are you able to use 'native' Internet Explorer, rather than the 'improved' AOL version?
For what it's worth, I use Firefox. It's just better.

Dickster · Joined: 12 Oct 06 Posts: 6

RyanMC · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 4:09 pm Post subject:

AOL is based on Internet Explorer, but it is heavily altered. I don't have any hard numbers in front of me, but it hasn't been over 1% since about 2003 or so. It has been steadily declining since then. Internet Explorer works for all the games on this site. Firefox works best for this site (and the rest of the net in my opinion), and is easy to download and install. I would recommend using Firefox over the AOL browser for all your browsing, you will get more consistent results on most web pages.

We can't test all browsers, because at times its impossible to make code work in all of them, so we pick the most common. We try to test in IE, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and Safari. There are a few mac people that have had a handful of errors in Safari, but since I don't have ready access to a mac I can't test it as completely.

AOL is a tiny market share of the browser world, if we started testing browsers with that type of share we'd never release another game. We would also have to bring every game on the site down to try and "fix" them. It's just not practical. You got upset about the suggestion to install a new browser. I don't really understand that. I have 5 browsers installed on my machine right now, and another 3-4 on my linux partition. If you don't want to install a new browser then you will have to get by on the errors you are seeing in AOL.
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Bkruppa · Joined: 08 Nov 05 Posts: 241 Location: Fremont, Ca, USA

What about my Commodore 64?