I keep running into erratic reloads on the SD boards. This has happened on two different computers entirely for the last couple of days. The pages load fine, but then one or more will glitch, throw an error, and reload.
I can only guess this is due to an ad of some kind. The page itself loads, but the adbars come up late, and would be loading right when the page crashes.
Not unless the ads are so popular that people are running over to come look at them. 
This hasn’t happened in a while but it’s happened to us several times in the past.
It’s the overwhelming traffic that comes to the site that’s crashing the system. When you come to the site and call up a page, there’s multiple tasks that need to be completed and a finite number of connections and resources to make that happen. You’re trying to do this and so are other people … there’s so many calls on the system to do stuff from so many people in so many different directions that the system just drops stuff. And so your page crashes.
Sorry this is happening to you, it’s an inconvenience. Hope it resolves for everyone soon.
Why would this occur after the page loads? That’s some awkward system architecture.
No, that’s pretty standard asynchronous web architecture these days. Sites were everything loads up front are old school.
… I’d prefer not to reveal my age in the context of why I might think webpages loading in that manner would be unusual. 
You know we’re talking about a site that’s still running vBulletin 3.7.3, right?
Heh, good point.
But seriously, 3.7.3 came out in 2008. While that’s certainly ancient in internet years, this design has been around for a while (sorry to make smiling bandit feel even older) . I remember creating a page in 2000 or 2001 that dynamically loaded elements after the main page load and thinking it was slick. And I was probably behind the times then.
You’re also talking about a board administration that resisted enabling polls for years because they thought it might cause technical problems. We’re not exactly riding the wave of cutting edge web stuff here. Half the board population probably gets grumpy if it doesn’t work with javascript turned off.
I get grumpy when it doesn’t work with the power off.
This is happening to me too. I was afraid it was malware!