There was a fundamental change to how some parts of the internet work, that occurred late last year; an old security standard was discontinued and all browsers updated to stop using it.

The day it happened is the day the forums started this TLS handshake nonsense; so it is something SSG need to sort out; no other website I visit is suffering from this, and you have to wonder if it is the neolithic forum software version causing the issue, and if there is a patch for it, or if they need to purchase v5.xxx - which probably means spending some time re-writing the forum code; which has been set in stone since the day they went up 12(ish) years ago.

Forum store has been text only for me since that day - across four different computers; one of which wasnt built until 2 months ago.

To be clear, the TLS issue varies in severity across different ISPs; it is particularly bad on my mobile ISP (O2), some days I cannot log in at all; but has also slowed down logging in via my main ISP account by a factor of at least 5.