I thought I'd spend some time cleaning up the forum code and wanted to let you know about some of the recent changes and fixes:
The avatars and in-post images used to use a separate imaging service which was convenient but didn't provide much control over caching which meant that each day you visited the site you were probably re-downloading those images again. As they are immutable they can be cached for a long time which saves bandwidth and speeds things up. There's also more server-side caching for them and they are usually optimized better now.
The logout issue should be fixed so no more "Hotel California" jokes. It was shockingly stupid and annoying what the problem was - the code I called to clear the login cookie caused the login to re-initialize and add the cookie back (what the ... ?).
More of the YouTube URL formats should be detected and converted into embedded video's.
I've moved some of the server side pieces for backend processing to Go which runs much faster and has allowed me to delete large chunks of the Python codebase. That means the front-end is now lighter so even though it runs faster it's also consuming fewer resources which is nice.
Also helping with performance are some extra layers to block the myriad of site attacks that happen from bots and idiots. Although they didn't have a huge impact because of the scalability of the cloud platform we use, blocking things sooner makes the site that little bit faster.
Some of the UI 'jumped' a little while loading which would cause re-paints which slows down the page rendering slightly and looked a bit ugly, this should be less apparent now.
The overall page weight should be reduced and some of the script loading improved. A fully progressive, mobile optimized site is still in the works that will be more "app like" and give almost instant-loading. Yeah - home-screen icon, fast startup, offline usage, push notifications and all that jazz too.
That's all the main stuff. Lots of other changes but mostly technical or for Google's benefit / SEO.
As always, let me know if anything isn't right or if you have any suggestions on improving the site.