Screen blanking when clicking a topic

Hi,

A user reported this issue where the entire screen would go blank on his laptop when clicking a topic after I updated the forum in this topic: Upgrading v2.2.0.beta4 forum with unknown local changes - Installation - Discourse Meta

I chalked it up to an issue with his laptop, as no one else was experiencing it.

We are now on the 3.5.0 latest beta2-dev version (been updating regularly since then) and I have started experiencing the same issue. First seen intermittently on a laptop connected to external monitor but only did it when I had Spotify running in the same browser. Strange.

Now I am seeing on a brand-new PC that I’ve just spun up. Spotify not running this time, and also it blanks every time I click a topic. The video output to the monitor re-syncs.

I couldn’t find any posts about it here, other than some unrelated screen blanking issues from years ago.

Here is a link to the forum: https://idmforums.com

Is anyone experiencing this on my forum or any other admins having this issue?

I’ve just been navigating on your community (anon user without login) and I haven’t experienced anything like you described. I searched for similar reports and found this on your community Forum upgrades - #23 by morphic - Site Feedback - IDM Forums is this the same issue?

Could it be a plugin maybe? Try navigating around topics in safe mode.

yes, that’s the one. Plugin sounds plausible. I’ll have a look at what I’ve installed

Wow, what an issue!

You’re on Windows, correct? Does this issue only happen with an external monitor connected on the laptop, or on the laptop’s own screen as well?

1 Like

Windows 11

Has happened both on the laptop monitor and the external monitor. What’s interesting is that if I do a screen recording, the recording doesn’t capture the dropouts at all. Just looks normal. Also, I have seen on occasion the screen “roll” instead of blank. Yeah, roll, like a Super 8 film!

So, I’ve tried a couple of things to no avail.

First, I commented out a few plugins in the app.yaml then rebuild. No change
Then, I put those plugins back in and removed others. No Change.
I’ve now gone into safe mode and it’s still doing it.

On my laptop it’s fine if I’m not connected to the external monitor (same monitor my PC is using) However, if I connect to the external, then it blanks as per my original issue.

One may chalk this up to the external monitor being the issue here. However, it only happens with my forum, and I wasn’t the only member with the issue. So, it could be some weird combination of hardware and software that we had in common.

1 Like

Yes, I suspect the issue is a combination of hardware plus something in the software that triggers hardware GPU acceleration… but what triggers it? Very hard to track down, I would imagine that this bug would show up in other Discourse instances (or that it would go away once you disable plugins/themes).

2 Likes

Most likely this would be video card or video card software related. Have you tried switching video card drivers (update to beta or try stable), have you tried disabling HDR. Does this happen on all browsers or just on edge?

3 Likes

Hey Sam,

Yeah, I’ve tried it on Edge, Brave and Chrome. All do the same thing. HDR isn’t supported on my monitor, so it was already disabled. Drivers are running stable, and I’ve run the latest package. The display resolution was running at 59.98 Hz, which I changed to 60Hz but that hasn’t changed the behavior.

An odd duck this one. I’ll try a few more things with the hardware setup. Maybe find a different monitor and see what happens.

Your forum posts often have media players, could it be HDCP related? Does it happen on a plain topic without any embedded players?

The “screen roll” glitching sounds like the video in this stackoverflow question, seemingly triggered by small dotted lines.

1 Like