Downloading from the TDB

[Duke W.]

When downloading the main TDB page and thread pages why is it that data is being downloaded from sites like yahoo, google, and facebook?

What is yahooapis and googleapis?

Also, sometimes when I submit a post, my carefully thought out paragraph spacing is lost and it's all one unreadable blob of single spaced text that I have to go back and edit to restore the proper paragraph spacing. What's going on?

Duke

[Michael W.]

Re: Downloading from the TDB

They're commonly known as 'trackers' and allow quick links to sites like facebook, twitter, google+ etc., all for the convenience of smartphone generation. It's a time and bandwidth consumer for the rest of us.

Install Ghostery

https://www.ghostery.com/

to block them. This is required in addition to Adblock for the rest of the garbage that pops up.

[Don H.]

Re: Downloading from the TDB

Duke
Mike W got your first part. Your second part comes from the fact that you are still accessing the internet using your Commodore 64 and IE2.0.
It is amazing to everyone that you can get on the site at all with your antiquated hard and software. Browse using Chrome or Firefox on some modern hardware and your text won't get all jumbled up.
Happy new year!

[John W.]

Re: Downloading from the TDB

The yahooapis and googleapis are installed so that Yahoo and Google can index our site without being able to log in. That way when a new Corvette owner starts searching for information about their car they will be able to see that you and others have contributed a mountain of information here at www.ncrs.org. Hopefully they will visit the TDB and decide it would be worth joining this organization.

[Duke W.]

Re: Downloading from the TDB

Thanks for the help, guys.

Duke

[Duke W.]

Re: Downloading from the TDB

For those of you with nothing better to do here's the story of how my phone/internet problems were resolved after four visits by Verizon techs going back to early November. The problems with phone noise and slow connection speed/high error rates was primarily during rain or damp/foggy conditions, and the first two visits resulted in "no problem found", but the problems persisted and got progressively worse.

On Thursday a tech came out, did some tests at the house junction box and said the drop to my house (which was the 41-year old original) should be replaced, but he didn't get here until nearly dark and said he wanted to come back and do that on Friday morning.

I then accompanied him to the B-box, which is located about 2000 feet away, where he did more tests and found noise and low resistance between the wires indicating shorts, so there was clearly a problem between the B-box and my junction box.

On Friday morning another tech showed up, but he had talked to the Thursday tech and understood the problem After replacing the house drop that he fished through the original conduit inside the wall he still found noise and possible shorts on the line, so he connected my house drop to a different pair. The cable running by my house has 25 pairs, and he said I may be the only one on the block still on copper, so there were plenty of unused pairs to choose from and he found a clean one.

After he left I logged on and got 45.2 kbps connection speed, which is normal, and later in the day I logged on again and got 49.2, which is as high as I have occasionally seen over the years.

I also noticed that the error rate went down from several hundred per megabyte of download to 100 or less. Needless to say speed has probably doubled, and I believe the high error rate was the source of the original problem I reported of lost paragraph spacing in thread replies.

Verizon keeps trying to bully me into fiber, but I refuse because I don't watch TV (except for college sports and occasional auto races that I can pick up over the air with an antenna) and absolutely HATE the Mickey Mouse way they install the ugly FIOS box with cables running all over the outside of the house, but I'm going to take another look at DSL.

Since Verizon has not made a deal with the California Public Utilities Commission on when copper support with end, I'm standing my ground!

Duke