Icons Showing Up Only As Boxes - Help

Hey guys,

All the icons for stars, flags, and at the top of the posting box (i.e. for links, photos, etc.) are all just boxes. I've refreshed multiple times and it keeps happening. There are additional things presenting as "just boxes" too. Other things are normal, like the emoji's and such.

Can you help? It's difficult to work around...

Thank you!!



AB

a reply to: AboveBoard

Clean your cache, cookies and history?

originally posted by: AboveBoard
Hey guys,

All the icons for stars, flags, and at the top of the posting box (i.e. for links, photos, etc.) are all just boxes. I've refreshed multiple times and it keeps happening. There are additional things presenting as "just boxes" too. Other things are normal, like the emoji's and such.

Can you help? It's difficult to work around...

Thank you!!

Simple stuff first.

-Clear your search history
-Get a free copy of SuperAntiSpyware, do a scan and then also let it kill all the cookies it finds.

That will probably clear it up.


AB

a reply to: charlyv

Okay. Thank you!!

- AB

Turn off your Script Blocker.

a reply to: AboveBoard

It is common these days for some fonts, icons and small graphics to come from another source site ('Content Delivery Network' or CDN), so as to reduce the size and load time of a web page by pulling in the data together from multiple locations simultaneously.

From the point of view of ad and script blocking algorithms, this can appear to be a cross-site scripting exploit (XSS) and so be blocked erroneously. This is the usual reason for this problem but there are several other things that could be causing it.

Getting things back to normal is NOT always as easy as removing the script blockers, but is the first thing I'd try.

Remote content can also be due to blocked (blacklisted) sites and domains and can even be from entries in your hosts file (Spybot S&D can add to your hosts file and do this kind of thing) or entries in your firewall/s.

An additional issue can simply be a timeout, where the off-site resource is way slower than the website and the web page gets rendered before the other data get there.

Between each attempt to remedy the problem, always clear the browser cache so that each re-read of the website pulls down complete data (from all sources) each time.

So, I'd firstly disable script and add blockers and see if that works. Adding an exception for the specific website or domain may also work but disabling the blocker is a blanket fix that will identify the source of the issue. You can then try re-enabling the blocker but permitting the specific site.

If that does nothing, I'd go for your hosts file which is usually in "C:_Windows_System32_drivers_etc_hosts" (replace the underscore character with the backslash character in the previous string. For some reason ATS is stripping backslashes from posts.) Note that the hosts file does not have a file extension (the dot and three characters). You will need to be Admin to edit it. Your hosts file is an older method for defining or blocking IP addresses so these days, you can probably leave it at the Windows defaults without compromising security. If you are part of a corporate network, though, it may be necessary for it to have some entries, so tread carefully and always make backups. The section between the lines below is the content of a standard host file:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next thing to look at if that doesn't work is to look at your Anti-Malware or Anti-Virus software. Leave the real-time scanning on but, if you can, turn off just the web filtering aspects. Remember to purge the browser cache!

If that fails to fix things, re enable the security and the next thing is to look at your firewall. If a major CDN source like Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare or Google is blocked, you probably want to fix that.

Failing that, I think you'd have to deep dive into your networking and particularly DNS, which can be a whole other issue! As a quick fix, you could use Google DNS at the IP address of 8.8.8.8 (set in the network adapter properties) and then from an Admin prompt, type "ipconfig /flushdns" (without the quotes) and press 'Enter'. This should purge the old cache and rebuild a new one automatically. You can close the command prompt box but it is probably a good thing to use the Google DNS, so I'd leave it there at this point.

And... hopefully by now the problem has been fixed.

a reply to: AboveBoard

Basically....log out/in/out, turn off comptr or RESTART it. Delete history, cookies, cache and Internet searching. Check zoom or page size too.

And switch to DESKTOP MODE even on mobile.