No, those are just missing graphics. I saw that someone had actually made a graphic that was just text that said their avatar.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Well, perhaps, but thats not the case with me at least, I get it on almost every page with different people, is it just due to the traffic?

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I get them while the "real" avatar loads. You folks with broadband don't know what you're not missing!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

What is this 'loads' of which you speak?

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

[Brain voice] Pinky, if I could reach you, I would hurt you![/Brain voice]

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

We're too fast.. Beep beep!

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

The one Fraser thinks about is perhaps the "I am not a" avatar someone (a regular, but I forgot who!) has. It links perfectly with the text beneath his name, which makes it a great avatar.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

Ah, I know who your talking about.

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The Radiation specialist I think...

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

The is offline and blah's Avatar are probably because when an image doesn't have a size specified and does have altenative text, Firefox renders it as plain text.
Apparently, under heavy load, the server drops image requests, so such things as the little ball after the name which indicates the online/offline status is replaced with the text.
I've also seen it on the Forum display, where the small boxes that link to next unread were replaced with the complete text.
It looks like it happens on clusters together with the Not permitted to enter message, which definitely makes me think it's overload management (or even genuine ressource starvation errors)

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Has anybody else been unable to access any Bad Astronomy website for the last few days? I haven't been able to access the main page, blog, or forums for several days now, although I could access the blog entries through thunderbird I was not recieving the comments like I usually do and could not reach the actual blog page. Then suddenly today everything is back to normal. It seems other people have posted on the forum in the meantime. Is this just me or did anyone else have a similar problem?

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

I had a bit of trouble yesterday for about 30min but other then that it is been up for me and many others.

It seems as though there are a lot of different problems as of late. Probably have to upgrade soon...

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I had some problems last night, between about 10 and 11 p.m. EST. There were periods when I could connect and others where I would get that 'can't find that website' error.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Ditto that swift

I also seem to be getting a lot of theese lately.

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

The other weird thing I have is that sometimes, if I use the Quick Reply box, my post doesn't get posted (things just seem to hang), but work fine with the regular Post Reply system.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Same here. If I then go to "Advanced" and try to post, it goes in right away.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

My guess is that since it happens at the same times when some other files aren't loaded, it's one of the .js files the editor uses that aren't loaded correctly.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

It happened gain to me today. 3am it was fine, when I visited again at noon I couldn't get in. I checked several times since then but couldn't get in. I tried about 3 minutes ago, couldn't get in, but now I can. It says it cannot connect to the server. I've tried firefox and internet explorer, both with and without my firewall on.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

12:30am AEST (2pm GMT) completly wouldn't let me in...

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

I noticed that all the websites from our provider were unavailable at that time. It lasted about 10 minutes or so.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.