Is anyone else getting very slow load times, timeouts with GOG bears?
Is it just me
Across the board
or just Australia getting the short end of the stick?

Edit:
It seems to be only the general forum.
The game forums are as quick as usual.

The table may need to be defragged/reorganized and reoptimized. Also depends on how many calls there are to the DB.

When i worked at a company a side project included making a scheduler program, which was basically just a web interface to a database with a few pages. I was told to do all requests through the DB, so there was something like 43 calls and it was starting to take 30+ seconds, for a nearly empty database for only 2 dozen employees.

To make a story short, the fewer calls necessary to pull the data up the better.

Though they could do something else that would require a little bit of work. I did a sudoku solver, and had an html output. I found it worked better if i exported the information as Javascript and let the page build itself based on basic algorithms, and it was a lot smaller too. Additional static inquiries could be made as necessary until cached. But with the rep thing out the window, there's little need for that. Same for building each post which has a lot of repeats of 'user is not logged in, user has permissions blocked, user's wishlist is not public' etc etc etc.

Ugg the html is ugly... I really hate the pushing of webpages as apps thing...

I always found the "What did just update" thread took about 5 - 10 seconds to open. Last few days I get a Gogbear a couple of times and the third attempt works. As far as that thread goes, perhaps it is too big and needs a fresh start
with a new thread?

Otherwise all ok here (as far as forum thread opening times, offline downloads etc). Using a desktop BTW.

Probably the trolls didnt like reps disappeared and attacked the servers.

You might not be far from the truth.

If the rep and up/down voting is removed, consider that the database is probably being called for each page with a huge list of which post number along with who up/down voted (so you don't get duplicates) which in a single page with bots can span thousands of votes then sifting through and determining if said votes affect which post.

It could be worse and asking per post what the votes are and that would be N times slower (N being the number of posts on the page, and i have mine set of 50 posts per page...).

Imagine then all that extra processing just going out the window...

I suspect GOG may just be running a script to hide REP from all of us, which may be causing lag for some of us.

No. To hide the 'rep' is a matter of literally commenting out 1-2 lines of code in the page display code.

Let's consider PHP, you'd do something like this. (my PHP is rusty so bare with me)

<src img="<?$USERIMAGE?>">
<?$USERNAME?>
<?$TITLE?>
<?print(UserDropdown);?>
rep: <?$USERREP;
$stars=calcstars($USERREP);
for ($N=0; $N<$stars; $N++) {
?> <src img="star image"> <?
}

etc etc. To hide everyone's rep you'd just comment out a few lines. I glanced at the output html code we get and i don't see any reference to rep, so we can't reverse it with a script or remove said script they'd have added.

The problem are all threads with a huge amount of posts. There are lots of them who get constantly bumped.

Try to load this thread

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/word_association_game

It loaded in 15,6 seconds here. Every huge thread should be closed and replaced with new fresh versions.

Problem with that is that the calls to said tables/columns are still there in the DB when they're queried, right?
Well, at least we can't know if they removed everything related to the rep system 'backend-wise'.

-edit:

Sorry, forgot to reply to OP: Yes, I'm also experiencing some gog bears here and there on General forums.

This is also true for the German subforum. You don't have threads with 10.000 - 100.000 replies there. The hiccups in the general forum occur when one or more of these threads got bumped with a new reply. I just tried to click on this thread

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/count_in_pictures

First GOG bear and then 20 sec. I have problems to load all threads with more than 10.000 replies. Either it takes long or I see the GOG bear. All new threads with less than 100 posts load very fast.

To calculate high/low rated yes it is. But the many-to-one relationship of postID and voterID means the voting has it's own table as there's almost no way to store it otherwise.

I mean, in theory all posts could include their voting in a string which has a list of numbers for user ID's for up/down voting... But that seems highly unlikely.

Regardless, if the rep is totally yanked out the speed (related to voting) would fix itself.

Defragging the database (probably via backup/restore or similar) would speed up quite a bit for variable length data (like the main text field) and having related posts in sequential sequence would speed it up too.

Speed has always been bad. I have 10 unread replies from years back and that link never works, nor can I find any of these replies (and nor could adalia fundamentals). The whole forum freaks along just about most of the time other times it’s worse.