these forums are slow as all hell and it's not our fault

Why is it always trying to connect to soe.com? Can the webmaster address this?

The forums have been unusable for months. I used to read every thread on the front page. As it stands now, I can barely stand to read one or two threads before I give up in frustration.

Not sure what you're talking about. Everything pops up nice and fast for me. What browser are you using?

same here

Try re-bookmarking the forums from the correct web address at daybreak.com. Perhaps your bookmark still points to soe?

I'm using the latest version of 64-bit Firefox and everything runs smoothly.

aye , same here I have no problems with pages loading on the forums ..

Can you try clearing your cookies for this site and letting me know if that resolves it? I personally experienced this at home and it was an old soe.com cookie.

I formatted my PC about two weeks ago. I have no bookmarks saved for this site, believe it or not. My browser is set up to delete all history and cookies when exiting the session. Furthermore, I experience this on every device that I access the forums from and this has been an ongoing problem for several months.

I've created a bookmark to the main "EverQuest Discussion" index, verified my settings (there are no cookies saved whatsoever) in Firefox, and I still see this adding at least 10 seconds to all page requests:

http://imgur.com/a/RxIME

Continuing...

I have two tabs open in a new session. One is for imgur, which I used to upload these screenshots. All of the other cookies are from Daybreak's site. There's no SOE.com cookie.

http://imgur.com/a/ltSvt

I experience the same behavior accessing this site from:

Personal desktop x2
Personal laptop
Work laptop
Amazon tablet
Samsung mobile
Blackberry

I know I can't be alone on this. There is something lurking in your site's code that is trying to pull data or redirect from soe.com and this ought to be purged once and for all.

Do you get that also when logging on a different forum account?

I would think so. But for good measure, I'm restarting the browser and creating a new forum account now...

I logged into an alternate account that I play with. Never registered with the forums. I immediately got this:

https://forums.station.sony.com/forbidden.html

Hit Back a couple of times and was able to continue the registration process. Then I came back to this thread and still had "Connecting to soe.com"

I had the same issue; accessing forums.daybreakgames.com via the german provider T-Online always had minute-long page buildups. It is not browser related, tested with IE11, FireFox and an Android smartphone. I used the browser's profiler to try to track down the cause, and somewhere happens an access to soe.com which always takes at least 20-40s.

Interestingly, via a different provider (german NetCologne), this issue does NOT happen.

For my T-Online access i have the following workaround in place:
Add the line "127.0.0.1 www.soe.com" to the end of the file "c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts".

I had this issue with IE. I solved it by disabling active scripting.

The forum isn't what I'd call fast, but it isn't slow either and I have no timeout problems with soe.com or other Sony related sites.

Try to reproduce it on a clean machine.

Same behavior in a new virtual machine. That's about as clean as you can get.

Adding entries for *.soe.com and *.station.sony.com is a good workaround, but this only works on Windows devices.

Perhaps this is a DNS issue with certain internet providers? I have AT&T and it loads very quickly.

I was thinking more along the lines of a caching issue with the impacted users' provider. That would certainly explain the soe.com reference persistence.

That's also a likely possibility. I'm in New England with Verizon FiOS at both home and business locations and AT&T for mobile on two devices (BB10 and Android OS).