Forum problems today
For the most part of Friday the forums sent out the wrong caching headers for threads, so that unless you performed a force-refresh in your browser (or cleared your cache), it would show you the cached version of that thread from the last time you saw it before 5am Friday. The bug ended up being a pair of single quotes that was supposed be double quotes, and once we fixed that around 3pm today everything returned to normal. Sorry about that.
Whenever you visit a forum index, topic index, or thread on the forums, the browser checks with the server to see if the page had changed since the last visit. If it hadn’t, the browser will load the cached version, and the script will stop right there without proceeding to query the forum database files, combine them with the forum templates, to serve up the HTML for your browser. This saves bandwidth, CPU processing time, and should result in a slightly faster feel to the forums. As far as I know we are one of a few handful forum applications out there (if not the only) that does proper browser caching (well, as of 3pm this afternoon anyway 8^) )