My guess was that it was intermittent.

We are actually hosting the site here ourselves and we have recently had what appears to be some occasional latency problems with our outbound internet and VPN connections so I was wondering if the same thing might be happening coming from the other direction.

As you've seen, the forum is getting spammed to death and the volume has picked up tremendously lately. I am not sure if the two are related or not but I am looking at implementing some things that may help that and should have those in place this week so I'll let you know when I've done that so we can see if it helps both the speed and spam problems.

Thanks