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MacRumors Site/Forums Causing Battery Drain?

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Just as another data point for reference, MR forums and website don't heat up my iPhone at all or cause any unusual drain on the battery. iPhone runs cool as a cucumber. With or without ad guard on.

iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 9.3.5 on Safari.
 
Just noticed this is happening to me. iPhone 12 Pro Max, iOS 14 up to date, running Purify on Safari. Lost about 10% battery in 20 minutes and phone is almost painfully hot. I practically never notice it getting hot otherwise. Oh and I spent the latter half of those 20 minutes writing a forum reply.
 
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Duff-Man says...I too have forum issues. Drains my phone battery, and on the desktop I consistently get "this page is using blah blah blah resources and has been reloaded" messages...main page AND forums. Don't care too much on the iMac but on the iPhone I just make sure I don't leave a MR tab open....use my phone for work almost all day and can't have a dead battery...oh yeah!
 
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No battery issue when browsing MacRumors here. However, when I have the ScreenFlow app opened when browsing MacRumors, the site often appears all distorted. I only have this problem with the MacRumors site. Everything comes back to normal when I quit ScreenFlow.
 
Same here. My phone gets hot af and automatically dims the screen within minutes surfing this site because of temperature issues. It’s just here. Never experienced it on any other site.
 
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FWIW, I too was plagued with my iPhone heating up and extreme battery drain on this site. I’m pretty sure it attributed to my iPhone 12 Pro now being at 88% battery health. I’m on this site the most throughout the day and it would be a shame to just give it up, which I planned on doing when my 13 Pro arrives. Anyways, I signed up for the site contribution for my own sanity and I can report that after perusing this site for an hour, my iPhone remained cool as a jewel whereas before, it would be hot and draining battery at an unacceptable rate. To me, it’s very worth it. Let’s be honest, what’s 25 bux for the year? That’s like .50 a week.
 
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Itinj24 said:
FWIW, I too was plagued with my iPhone heating up and extreme battery drain on this site. I’m pretty sure it attributed to my iPhone 12 Pro now being at 88% battery health. I’m on this site the most throughout the day and it would be a shame to just give it up, which I planned on doing when my 13 Pro arrives. Anyways, I signed up for the site contribution for my own sanity and I can report that after perusing this site for an hour, my iPhone remained cool as a jewel whereas before, it would be hot and draining battery at an unacceptable rate. To me, it’s very worth it. Let’s be honest, what’s 25 bux for the year? That’s like .50 a week.
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It's absurd to me that you have to spend $25 to have a site function correctly.
 
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I agree. But we haven't been able to reproduce it reliably, so it's hard to track down.

If you use a content blocker due to excessive battery drain, I'm not going to get bent out of shape. But the $25/year option does support the site and provides you with a way to eliminate ads/javascript.
 
bpeeps said:
It's absurd to me that you have to spend $25 to have a site function correctly.
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I don’t disagree at all. Just throwing it out there for those who can afford it. It’s a small price I pay to be able to stay on here without killing my battery, give some helping info, get some helping info and get my chops busted from time to time.
 
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It overheats my 11pro max!.
Need to pay $25 to avoid showing ads?, does that really stop the trackers form abusing my phone?,
Is there a switch in the Experimental section maybe of Safari that can be activated?, or any other way, other than using an ad blocker?.
 
iStorm said:
Cool, I wasn't aware of this, but I hope it's not "the solution" for the battery drain and heating issue.


A site can still show ads without draining your battery or heating up your device. Some of us don't mind the ads; however, we shouldn't have to pay money just so it'll run more efficiently though. Can you imagine if that becomes a new trend on the web...Hey, pay us money so our site doesn't eat up your battery and heat up/throttle your device. (I'm not at all saying or implying this what MacRumors is doing here.)

It’s somewhat frustrating that a site mainly used for reading can have a big impact on the battery. The forums don’t even show that many ads compared to the articles or homepage. I’m suspecting some inefficient Javascript is running in the background, but maybe MacRumors doesn’t have much control over this if it’s coming from a 3rd party.
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Totally agree. I wonder why so few people or Mcarumors staff has not addressed this. I can accept the ads, but draining battery for using the text based forums?. People just don’t care.
 
It's been hard to track down. We are using off-the-shelf software (Xenforo) and a mainstream ad-network which powers thousands of sites. We have looked into it as best we can and have asked our ad network to look into it.

It's hard to tell how many people it affects. Certainly it seems to affect some people consistently, but it's hard to reproduce.

I had hoped it would resolve itself, since it's hard to track down. We'll keep talking to our ad network, but if it is really causing you consistent problems, your best options are to use a content blocker or pay for the ad-free membership here.
 
How long has this ad software been used? I only started getting this issue somewhere around midway through iOS 14. Definitely wasn’t around during iOS 13, for me at least.

Edit* Just went to check when this thread was started…
 
Itinj24 said:
How long has this ad software been used? I only started getting this issue somewhere around midway through iOS 14. Definitely wasn’t around during iOS 13, for me at least.

Edit* Just went to check when this thread was started…
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Jan 1 2020 is when we switched to this ad network. It’s most likely a specific ad or set of ads that are causing the issue, rather than the ad code in general. It would also explain why some people might be getting it more often than others.
 
arn said:
Jan 1 2020 is when we switched to this ad network. It’s most likely a specific ad or set of ads that are causing the issue, rather than the ad code in general. It would also explain why some people might be getting it more often than others.
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Gotchya, makes sense. I must’ve somehow avoided those specific ads til sometime in the beginning of this year. At first I thought it was Safari in general not running efficiently on one of the iOS 14 updates but being that I’m on this site more than any other, I was able to eventually narrow it down.

I had an ad blocker running on my eero secure subscription but that didn’t help one bit. The contribution to this site did though.
 
arn said:
It's been hard to track down. We are using off-the-shelf software (Xenforo) and a mainstream ad-network which powers thousands of sites. We have looked into it as best we can and have asked our ad network to look into it.

It's hard to tell how many people it affects. Certainly it seems to affect some people consistently, but it's hard to reproduce.

I had hoped it would resolve itself, since it's hard to track down. We'll keep talking to our ad network, but if it is really causing you consistent problems, your best options are to use a content blocker or pay for the ad-free membership here.
Click to expand...

It was still happening for me even when I tried using a content blocker. Don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, just FYI.
 
Itinj24 said:
I had an ad blocker running on my eero secure subscription but that didn’t help one bit. The contribution to this site did though.
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Someone else had said this and it still doesn’t make sense.

Ill double check what happens with and without contributor status but it shouldn’t behave differently than what a content blocker does.
 
xxray said:
Firefox Focus. It's a browser but has a content blocker built-in that you can use in Safari.
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Firefox focus is an weird case. There have been lots of focus complaints about battery life on android and at least one on iOS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bumc2l

F28184F4-6AFE-4B33-B98C-77A2280E1030.jpeg

I tried to test it and couldn’t get anything reproducible. If you are just using it as a content blocker, I’d suggest deleting it and trying something else.
 
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I know you are all doing what you can, but my issue has gotten significantly worse after iOS 15. It’s probably more correlating issues than caustive (indexing after new update etc.) but still very frustrating this has been going on for months. I’m not opposed to supporting the website because I appreciate the source of info, but I am opposed to supporting it as a method of fixing an issue that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
 
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I’ve been having this issue for months on both my iPhone and iPad. It feels like they are running benchmarks with the heat and degree of battery drain. This is despite a content blocker. Frankly, I barely visit the website anymore since this happens every time.

EDIT: switched my content blocker to AdGuard and that seems to have reduced the overheating and battery drain. This is still a major issue and needs to be fixed. I shouldn’t need a content blocker to prevent my M1 iPad Pro from turning into a toaster oven when visiting this website.
 
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