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I've tried to enter both the mathematics and hbar chat rooms, but some weird stuff is happening. Here's what the site rooms page (when you click chat from the drop down stack exchange menu) looks like:

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And here's what the hbar looks like:

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Here's what the hbar transcript looks like:

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I restarted my computer; same problem. It was working a few hours ago, then I shut my computer and came back to it just now and it looked like this. I'm using a chromebook. I am at a coffee shop using their wifi, but I'm not sure why that would be a problem. What in the universe is going on?

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    $\begingroup$ to my non-expert eye it looks like a) the connection is for some reason slow and the site doesn't build up (do other homepages load normally?) or b) some kind of dynamic content is disabled (I sometimes get similar things using NoScript). Any chance that might be an issue? $\endgroup$
    – Sanya
    Nov 25, 2016 at 21:27
  • $\begingroup$ @Sanya dynamic content disabled...any way I could check for that? As for other homepages, the physics site and physics meta site load just fine. $\endgroup$
    – auden
    Nov 25, 2016 at 21:28
  • $\begingroup$ as the other pages load fine, I think we can almost rule that out. Usually you would need to activate sth like that by an addon or at least in the options of your browser - if you did neither, I wouldn't worry about that possibilty. $\endgroup$
    – Sanya
    Nov 25, 2016 at 21:32
  • $\begingroup$ @Sanya, yeah, and it was fine a few hours ago - I don't know how it could've disabled while I wasn't doing anything on the computer =) $\endgroup$
    – auden
    Nov 25, 2016 at 21:33
  • $\begingroup$ Sorry if this is already known you, and it is a rehash of other comments, but if you look at the source code of any html page, you will see an obscure reference to calling the css stylesheet from another server, and you should be able to see the address of that server. If there is no full address, just something thing like "style.css" or somesuch, then it is in the same directory as the half rendered page you are alreading seeing, so another slow sip of coffee is called for. If you are using vpn, which OF COURSE you are!!!, it will slow a faraway server even more. $\endgroup$
    – user108787
    Nov 28, 2016 at 19:59
  • $\begingroup$ A tip for next time - if you're on chrome, hit ctrl+shift+I and then go to the Console. (Other browsers will have the same but not necessarily on that route.) In cases like this, it will be failing to load stuff - and it will tell you why. If it tells you, for example, that a .css file got a download timeout, then you have a much better idea of what happened there. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Nov 28, 2016 at 20:23

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This is the sort of thing that happens when a website's HTML loads but the CSS does not: you get the content, but presented with the default HTML style, which has a very 1997 look to it. My wild guess is that the content and style information, perhaps also for the main site and the chat site, are all served from different machines, and for whatever reason your coffee shop internet is not able to reach the CSS server for the chat site.

There seem to be plenty of people using the chat server this afternoon, which makes me suspect that the trouble is on your end. A check with mods from other sites doesn't raise any reports of problems. But I asked if there was any news of a problem on chat :-)

I tentatively blame your coffee shop internet. See if it's still weird when you get back to your usual configuration.

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  • $\begingroup$ Back to usual configuration - and it works. Darn that coffee shop internet =) $\endgroup$
    – auden
    Nov 26, 2016 at 0:31
  • $\begingroup$ Indeed, the HTML content itself comes from chat.stackexchange.com but the CSS comes from cdn-chat.sstatic.net, which are (apparently) different servers. What heather is seeing is a common problem on unreliable internet connections. It can sometimes be fixed by refreshing the page, depending on just how unreliable the connection is. $\endgroup$
    – David Z
    Nov 26, 2016 at 7:58

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