Hi,
I’m not seeing any active skype buttons on your site so I cannot say anything specific here.
What I can say is that sometimes the Skype servers respond very slow which will impact page load on your site even though there is only a small timeout set for these queries. The only thing to prevent this delay completely is to disable the checking of online status completely by switching the Skype Online Status option Status texts for the {status} tag to Disabled. In this case, the status check will not take place but if you chose a theme that uses a dynamic status image taken from the Skype server, that image will still reflect your online status.
And in the case of the user ID dominor.novus it could be that the dot in the name is causing an issue. It has been reported before… I’d have to take a closer look to see what is going on.
direct.sponsor is now online and should reflect in:
http://www.directsponsor.org/profile/web-team/
…and…
http://www.directsponsor.org/profile/direct-sponsor/
This profile uses the “Echo / Sound Test Service” and the same issue occurs so we might be able to rule out the punctuated user ID problem.
The page freezes while it’s loading the Skype status. Unknown appears as the status until I refresh four to five times.
What are my options besides disabling the status? Is it worth my while contacting Skype directly? This limits half my intended functionality for your plugin (Skype’s fault, not yours).
Sorry, still not seeing any Skype buttons. Do I need to be logged in or something?
I notice you are using BuddyPress. With extended profiles?
Sorry, yes. You needed to be logged in. That’s fixed now. You can now view the Skype status on each of the profiles (without needing to be logged in):
http://www.directsponsor.org/profile/web-team/ (direct.sponsor)
http://www.directsponsor.org/profile/direct-sponsor/ (direct.sponsor)
http://www.directsponsor.org/profile/andy/ (echo123)
I’m not using BuddyPress though I did consider it. I’m using bbPress 2.0 for forum functionality but the author pages are based on my own custom page template. I just swapped the “author” slug for “profile” and swapped the user name for the display name in a URL friendly format. I’ve used an action hook to create/edit/output additional profile fields.
OK so I now see direct.sponsor showing Skype status: Online twice and echo123 as offline.
The Echo123 test service will always show offline on the web even though it appears online to you when you add the service to your contacts. See http://mystatus.skype.com/echo123.txt … They clearly did not check the option ‘Allow my status to be shown on the web’ under their Skype clients Privacy settings 😉
Anyway, direct.sponsor seems to work fine and I do not see much of a delay in page load. The difference between the user pages and some of the normal pages seems to be about 300-400ms on average. At least as far as I could see just now.
The status of Unknown might appear when there is an error (usually a timeout) when trying to query the Skype server. You can change that text on the Skype Online Status settings page under Advanced Options > Custom status texts > Error (none) … Sadly, I cannot force the Skype server to respond. Increasing the timeout might help but it will also increase page load 🙁
I have considered moving away from querying the Skype server on page load and replacing it with an ajax call but implementing that will take some time. Which I cannot spare at the moment, I’m afraid…
…moving away from querying the Skype server on page load and replacing it with an ajax call… – is an excellent idea, because time delay on page load sometimes is very long… I just can’t use your plugin for that reason.
And, if it helps your, there is a plugin on Joomla – Skype AJAX Status.
kg69design, thanks for the suggestion. for the time being, i would advise you to switch off active online status checking as described in my first reply in this thread (second post) which leaves you with a ‘normal’ skype button that does not delay page load any more than copy-pasting a button in a widget…
Thanks for advice and for plugin.
