Ad load times can slow things down. We're not carrying those ads on our servers, though. They are on the advertisers servers, and those affect load time almost as much as our servers do. Adblockers don't really speed it up, the ads still try to load, but aren't displayed is all. We still ping the adservers when you load a page. It's just blocked from displaying on your computer.

We're also bvery graphics heavy, so older browsers have problems, slow connections have problems, and if your new systems aren't kept up to date, there can be problems as well.

Finally, if you are running adblock or script blockers, those programs can slow the load time all on their own by blocking some forum functionality as it cycles through your exceptions list.