Working with caching issues in StoryMaps

[SaraJL]

Hello everyone!

This is something I've gone back and forth with at Tech Support and had a lot of frustration because it's hard to reproduce - but I (and some other users I've worked with) occasionally experience a lot of performance issues related to how the browser caches information in StoryMaps.

Typically, I only recommend Chrome - some users may try Safari but that for sure causes problems (it doesn't work well with our SAML single-sign on for some reason), but switching to another browser will almost always fix it.

Lately, we've started the process of converting some of our legacy StoryMap projects to the current builder, and I've been having a few issues with caching in the browser. I've attached a couple of videos:

• Video 1: For some reason on sidears, it will automatically jump to the last photo in the image order (about 8 secs in). If I scroll up and down it stays on that photo instead of scrolling to the previous one
• Video 2: The order is correct, but when I try to page back and forth, the images will stop loading altogether.
  • 19 secs in, I'll refresh the page and it will almost look like the page freezes and won't load.
  • 28/29 seconds in, the image is overlapping the sidecar and I'll have to refresh the page again.
  • 56 secs: I'll scroll down the page but the floating windows no longer appear on the sidecar

This caching issues are pretty much constant! I have some heafty projects that I'll need to switch to the new StoryMaps builder, so this is slowing me down quite a bit. Does anyone else experience similar issues? Just wondering how you worked around it.

And before anyone asks - I'm on the latest version of Chrome, and I do see the same problem in other browsers (I have tried Edge and Firefox as well. I'm on Windows so no Safari, but I've seen it happen on Macs for other users). The issues are intermittant/irregular in occurence, so sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. Clearing out the cache will sometimes help, but it gets to the point where I will have clear the cache out every time I publish the project for it to work.

Thank you for the help!

[OwenGeo]

@SaraJL - I'm sorry you are running into this issue. I just tried to reproduce the situation based on your videos, but I'm not seeing the same thing. I'm not sure I have enough information to determine what might be causing this.

Are you able to share your story publicly and post a link here so we can take a look to see if there is anything odd about it? If not, please contact Technical Support and they can work with you to determine the cause of the issue you are seeing.

[SaraJL]

@OwenGeo it took a little bit - but I finally have a link I can share!

It happens in this StoryMap occasionally - but I've also had it happen in other projects. I have reached out to Tech Support multiple times - but they just tell me they can't reproduce it.

The only way I've been able to address it:

• Clear out my browser cache every time I publish a StoryMap
• Edit the StoryMap in a regular browser, but only view the published version in an Incognito window
• Delete and reupload the same picture multiple times

Sometimes it works - but when I start to do a bunch of edits on the project, that's when the images will start disappearing. It's almost like there is a lag for ArcGIS Online to register the updates for images. But I'm not really sure. I'm just of open to any ideas at this point because it's difficult to work on some projects because of this.

I'm in the process of converting some of our legacy StoryMaps into the current template, so we're working on a lot of similar projects to this atm.

Thank you!

[OwenGeo]

@SaraJL - Thanks for the additional info. I just spent some time with your story and am still not able to reproduce the issues you describe. I'm not sure what to tell you at this point other than to try to continue to work with support to see if you can isolate the issue. It may be something specific to your machine or network environment.

One thing I could recommend is if you feel that you are seeing this issue with longer stories, try breaking up your very long stories into smaller stories. You can group several related stories in a collection so they can still be shared together (like this multi-part story, for example: The Deep). Shorter stories are a good practice regardless of any technical issues you may encounter since they are more approachable for audiences.

[SaraJL]

Thank you for letting me know!

Normally, I recommend to users to break up information (because it's more reader friendly) - these projects I'm working on at the moment are actually StoryMaps that were originally created in the legacy templates, and I'm recreating them in the current builder. I'm trying to duplicate as much functionality as possible - and then my plan is to go over the projects and make some suggestions to change formatting.

I've spoken with tech support multiple times, but they are also having trouble duplicating the issue, so I'm not sure what the next steps are to take at this point.

This video clip might be another good example - I'm trying to create a sidecar with a map, and there is a little map snapshot at the bottom. If I go from one slide to another, it won't update the map snapshot to reflect where I actually am on the map (but looks fine in the editor). It seems to get stuck on the previous  slide of data. I can go to Editor mode and try and resave it to the right location, but it always seems to just get stuck on the previous slide:

[OwenGeo]

@SaraJL - The thumbnails in the bottom of the sidecar builder have never updated to show the configured map view, so that is expected. Those thumbnails only show the thumbnail from the map's item details. They are meant as an indicator of what type of content you have in that slide, but do not show you the exact map view if you have updated it by toggling layers or changing the zoom/extent.

[SaraJL]

Not the thumbnails for the sidecar tiles - I'm talking about the globe snapshot map.

Mine looks like this:

It should look like this:

[OwenGeo]

@SaraJL - Oh, I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding. That could be a bug with the overview map that we can try to look into, but I don't see that map from your video in the story link you shared above. Is that something you could share?