I have tried to find any patterns that might help isolate some of the web site problems and I think I found one. I can usually connect and open messages that are short threads, but the system bombs out on threads that have been going on for a very long time. There are 3 or 4 threads that are exceptionally long.

I think we should abandon the long threads (say those over a 100 responses) and start new ones.

Some forum softwear allows thread lengths to be limited in size. I'm not sure if this softwear does or not, but we can certainly test the theory on our own. As I think about it, it does make sense that the server and softwear would really struggle to index and retrieve the long threads.