It’s happening more and more often, it seems to me.
Ugh. It really ruins the fun of messageboards.
Maybe it’s just me.
Been dragging for me for the past week or so as well.
I’m experiencing a slowdown as well. I’m actually glad to hear it’s apparently the board and not a problem with my computer as I’d feared.
It has been absolutely slow for me as well, from work, from home, and over 4G mobile network.
Yes, it’s bad for me too.
Same here. I thought it was my Internet connection.
Slow, but not unlike what seems to happen every other week.
Slow with some odd overlap-ish thing happening. It’s almost like a couple pixel=blocks of other pages are getting stuck to some of the pages I’m trying to read. Somewhat like the old AOL boards when sections of ads would get stuck.
Well, I don’t know what the hamsters were fed recently, but it’s lightning fast now! 
When I load the board, I see a little message at the bottom of the window that states what’s happening. Typically, with the delay, I see the board is waiting on one of those ad server sites. So, it’s only partially the dope’s fault.
It’s taken 5-10 minutes just to open a thread most of the time this past week.
The SDMB uses a lot of trackers that slow things down considerably for all users, paid and unpaid. I disabled them a long time ago with a program called Ghostery.
Everything is loading normally for me, so I suspect one of those trackers may be causing this recent spate of performance complaints.
Thanks for the tip, Crazyhorse, just one question about the app, do you just download it and it does the rest on its own? Do you turn it on each time? Does it do it’s thing automatically? Or does the user need to be pretty savvy to understand how to engage it properly? Just curious!
Thanks Crazyhorse.
Wow, there were 9 trackers active when the program found them. No wonder it is so slow.
It downloaded in seconds. Thereafter, there was a very short tutorial that ran in a little window. It’s really simple. When it’s installed and you access the dope, a little list comes up (shown in Crazyhorse’s first link) that let’s you set them to off by just sliding a little button from green to red. It’s really something a computer novice can do easily. A little list appears in the lower corner when you change screens, it’s set to last for 15 seconds and easily changed to 3 seconds or not at all in the settings option.
After testing it for 15 minutes now, I find the situation 80% better. sometimes there’s still a delay, but most of the time there is none.
ETA, the little list comes up when you click the little ghost icon in the upper right. Looks like something from pac man.
I downloaded it, there was no tutorial, it doesn’t seem to do anything, and there are zero instructions, so I’m not sure whether it’s working or not, or have any hope to make it work! No buttons nothing. I’m mystified!
No icon in my browser, Safari, no lists. (iPad mini!)
I think it’s for Chrome. It came from the Chrome site.
BTW, it’s up to **16 **trackers blocked now. Any wonder the dope is slow, we’re feeding all those parasites.
I’m not familiar with Ghostery – although it looks like a pretty good program – but I didn’t see an option for a Safari version, only Chrome. If you don’t see an icon, it’s not installed.
A little experimentation with Ghostery shows that straightdope.com uses 7 to 18 trackers and ad servers per page, more than any other site I have tried so far. That certainly won’t improve the speed any.
Are members subject to delays due to this, even though they won’t see the ads? Maybe, maybe not. And even if they don’t see the ads, the beacon and analytic routines are probably still collecting data – an inside SDMB tech person would have to confirm this.
However, with all trackers blocked, it still took 40 seconds to bring up the results from a search screen, so trackers aren’t the only problem with speed on this site.
Thanks to Crazyhorse for suggesting this useful tool.
Yes, many thanks!