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I hesitate to come back again on this issue, as I feel confident that, as you have shown, Nigel, the problem experienced by the user must be somehow associated with her specific set-up. To this end, she plans to present the problem to her local Mac expert when he returns from a few days away.

HOWEVER, I am puzzled by the something she has told me in her latest e-mail, and I thought I should share it with you. I had explained to her that the problem was clearly associated with javascript and that it appeared that, although her browser setting indicated that javascript was enabled, something was seemingly preventing javascript from functioning as it should when she accessed my website. But to convince her that it really was not specific to my website but would probably apply to all websites that used javascript, I pointed her to two other sites which have connections to mine and to which I provide links from my Home Page. Both sites use webtrees. Before suggesting she access these two sites, I first checked them from my PC with javascript disabled in Chrome. Sure enough, both presented the same problem (‘the ever-turning wheels’ on blocks using javascript and therefore failing to open).

Her first response to me last night was that one of those sites (the ‘HARVEY’ site) produced the same problem she had described on my site, but that the other one (the ‘CUMBERLAND’ site) functioned perfectly normally. This morning she followed up with another report, telling me, I quote:

{i’ve just tried the Harvey Family Tree again and I find that, if I wait – less than a minute – it works. The Cumberland website works immediately but yours refuses to perform however long I wait.}

So it would appear that javascript does not simply have to be enabled for the blocks to load successfully but it also has to have a certain level of resource that is presumably lacking on this user’s system, and that the resource demands of the blocks on my site would appear to be greater than those on the other two sites. The ‘problem’ blocks on all three sites are Slide Show, Statistics, On This Day and Up Coming Events; in addition, on my site, the Changes in the Last Seven Days block also fails to load correctly. Comparing the three sites, the ‘CUMBERLAND’ site – the one on which the problem does not arise, is the smallest, having 8,098 individuals, 13,846 events and 142 media items; the ‘HARVEY’ site (which takes its time but finally gets there) is the largest in terms of individuals (21,552) and events (39,853) but only has 120 media items. My site has 15,120 individuals, 38, 644 events and 5678 media items (the majority jpeg files between 100K and 500K, but also a good many PDF files and a number of heavier-weight audio and video files). It would appear that the significanty larger media presence on my site is somehow indirectly responsible. And although I can imagine that having an impact on Slide Show and Statistics, I can see no obvious reason why it should prevent say ‘Changes in the last seven days’ (VERY few items) from loading correctly. It seems as though ALL of the blocks which use javascript are prevented from loading correctly if any one of them is blocked by some resource constraint (or probably more likely that they are handled sequentially and one that is blocked holds up all the others??).

Anyway, I thought I should pass all this on for completeness. If the extra information suggests to you any obvious action she could take to solve the problem, I’d appreciate your input Nigel. Otherwise I’ll leave it to her to try to resolve with her Mac guru and report their findings back here.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14