Interface is buggy, slow loading times

Hey folks,

I just created an account and tested the free Frozen Sick starter campaign for D&D 5e to get a feel for the app. Our group is thinking about switching to a VTT since we’re getting more and more scattered across the country and face-to-face sessions are getting harder to organize. I was kinda hoping the app would take a bit of work off my plate, too.

That said, I ran into quite a few hiccups and I’m wondering - am I doing something wrong, or is Roll20 just kinda buggy right now?

• Pages load pretty slowly.

• Character sheets sometimes need multiple attempts to load. And when they don’t, I just get the background with nothing else showing up.

• Sometimes notes in the right sidebar won’t load, even though I’ve looked at them before. Nothing happens when I click on them. I either have to duplicate the note and open the copy, or refresh the browser with F5 to make it work again.

• Some links in the notes are broken. I get a “Page not found – couldn’t connect to journal.roll20.net” error.

• All character sheets for monsters and NPCs are set to "PC sheet" by default, which is pretty annoying.

• Overall, the interface feels sluggish and glitchy.

Is this just me, the campaign, or is that the current state of Roll20?

For context: I’ve got a modern gaming PC and fast internet. Everything else works totally fine, no issues with other sites or services. I've tested with Firefox and Chrome, both latest builds.

Interesting report. Not sure. 

Did you create your Frozen Sick game on Roll20 Jumpgate, or Roll20 classic? If you created it very recently then Jumpgate is the default selection. Between the 2, Jumpgate is quicker and more responsive, but I play on Classic and it is perfectly responsive and functional too. Neither should have most of the symptoms that you described.

Possibly... changing some Roll20 settings or a browser setting might improve your performance. 

Possibly... cloudflare (bot protection) may be slowing or getting in the way for some weird reason that needs looking-into. 

Possibly... you might want to report this to Roll20 Help Center and try/hope to get a response from Roll20 Team.

It could maybe also-be that your expectations of responsiveness are high, and the website is just going as fast as it can. For example Character Sheets, in the best of cases it takes 1-2 seconds for the Character Sheet to load and you can quickly see a spinning grey d20 (that's normal and not considered sluggish for this site).

However when it comes to your description of the character sheet not loading at all --- that is a problem, that is something going wrong. (That possibly suggests something with the cloudflare, or ISP or DNS, or something to do troubleshooting.... it sounds like an issue where your browser is not connecting to the character-sheet data server reliably..). 

Is Roll20 experiencing some sort of temporary outage that's site-wide and everyone is seeing all those slowdowns you mentioned? No. There are 1000's of games happening on Roll20 right now as we speak, which is normal, and there are very few reports of slowdowns like you're describing. It's not a widespread outtage, and it's not 'just the way things are now'. Yes there's a few people reporting lag, and in many cases those Lags come-down to a setting or something about the specific game table set-up that they're loading/playing. 

Here is a status page of Roll20 servers being up:

https://status.roll20.net/

Here is the number of d20 dice that people have rolled in the last 24 hours:

https://app.roll20.net/home/quantum

You did well by testing on Firefox and Chrome. I would say it's time to start going deeper into troubleshooting steps.

No fun, but probably start with Log in on Incognito or Private mode and try it. If not then try clearing your Cache and re-try. Try to Toggle Hardware Accelleration ON and OFF in your browser settings and test both ways. Try to log in with a Dummy account (an alt account of yours). Try to have some of your Players log in and tell you if they are experiencing it to. AND-OR just send a Help Center Report