What’s changed at the BBC News site? There must be something because I spend more time at Sky or the papers instead now. On the rare occasions I do visit something about the site irritates me.
As I read an article today something kept distracting me, it happened so fast it was over before I could see the cause. My head bobbing trying to find the cause must have been a site.
To find out what was happening I stopped reading the article and watched the refresh gauge on the bottom right of my browser. After a few seconds there it was! A brief flicker. Not a full refresh, just the mere shade of an outline on the progress bar which suggested something was happening in the background.
There was no ticker on this page so that could not be the cause.
I viewed the source and a few lines down spied an odd statement in an HTML comment “PULSE_ENABLED:yes” WTF?
Are the BBC are trying to annoy me (as if the license fee squandered on pointless court cases isn’t enough)?
Sifting through copious amounts of JavaScript and duplicated dependencies and a bizarre selection of bloated common css errors leads to many more curious comments.
It’s sad, I like their content and I suppose as I pay for it so I should be encouraged to use it but this “pulse” issue is probably the reason I lost interest in it.
peculiar as I assume this problem is going to reek havoc with their stats, but then why should the BBC be monitoring stats?
Sometime since September last year the BBC removed the annoying refresh. I am not surprised, I could not have been the only person frustrated by it. Anyway, thought I would fess up and admit I am back to using it again :-)