This is just a short, whiny diary about one of my pet peeves. There are a number of sites that I frequent for news stories and political opinion, including several where I regularly interact in the comment sections. One of those for the past several years has been The Hill. While the site ownership is pro-Formerly, they have had a number of reasonable stories to make up for the regular drops from Turley and Concha. (They will never repay America for John Solomon.)
Something changed in their site software, though, which has caused me to delete their bookmark and stop using them as a source. I am tired of being annoyed. They have every story page set up to autoreload on about a ten minute cycle. This means that if you are engaged in the comments, perhaps even right in the middle of entering a comment, the page might disappear on you without notice and reload.. Aside from being annoying as fuck to begin with, this also closes the comments, often making it difficult to find the same spot.
I was aware for quite some time that this “feature” was part of their pages, as every time I would load one of their stories Firefox would alert me, “Firefox prevented this page from automatically reloading.” In the past few months, the programmers at The Hill have found a way to work around this, and the page autoreloads started happening. I searched for a counter-tactic online and loaded a program that claims to prevent autoreload. Apparently they use the same tech as Firefox as their software is ineffective in stopping The Hill pages from reloading.
I have to presume that the reason they do this is to artificially inflate their page load counts. Well screw them. They will get no more page loads from me, or members of the 800 person FB group I administer. No more posting The Hill articles there either. Not worth the aggravation.