FWIW I've had one of my images "go sour" by the time I uploaded it
to a Challenge gallery (a couple of months ago), and I'm using IE
6.0.28 and Windows 2000 SP3. MFC, who was monitoring pBase at the
time, noticed it was troublesome and immediately quarantined it --
exactly as he had to do yesterday with at least one image from a
Macintosh. Also FWIW, that image was saved as a standard JPEG in
Photoshop 7.0, as was mine in the earlier episode.
I've seen other reports in the pBase forum that reveal it's a
problem for other than DPR forum/Challenge users. The common
element
seems to be IE which can become fatally unresponsive once
a particular image is viewed, having to be relaunched to continue.
The cure has inevitably been to remove and repost the image,
generally resaving a new copy of it in one's image editor first.
I've struck situations where the workaround was to use another
browser, generally having good results with Opera. However, as
reported earlier in this thread, there have also been situations
where nothing will work, and it's quite possible that here we are
talking about casual but totally different problems.
Yesterday was a case in point, where I was having all sorts of
trouble with even fresh instances of IE, with randomly broken
thumbnails even at gallery levels that had not had any new
individual images posted to them (defying the "poisoned image"
trigger notion in this case). Refreshing the screen would sometimes
resurrect the missing thumbnails, but with a fair probablility of
showing
others as broken instead.
What's starting to become evident is that a fair bit (but by no
means all, IMO) of this is indeed being precipitated by anomalous
states of images
as uploaded which might not fit any normal
definition of "corrupt". I get the impression that it's not the
fault of the user, his/her platform or image editing software, but
a peculiar interaction that involves IE, PBase and
maybe
something about a particular image.
Once a "problem" image has been identified, there's no apparent
cure other than to delete and reload it; so the image may by this
time be considered to have been corrupted, but just where this is
happening is not known. As a hedge against further frustration and
waste of time, I think most people will prepare a new image anyway
at their own end, but it hasn't yet been proved whether this is
strictly necessary; i.e. we don't know for sure whether it's
something about the image as it comes out of the editing software,
or a corruption that's occurring in the upload process and
involving some odd pBase/IE interaction.
Having everyone do all their uploads via something other than IE
might prove something, but would be an impossible ask of course.
Mike
Just tested it on my PC at work, it is the same config as my home
PC, Win2k, IE6.0, no problem viewing links on either system. I also
tested an NT 4.0 IE 5.5 system, it works fine too. Are the problems
only on Mac systems? It would be helpful if everyone posted thier
OS and browser information for comparison.
