Found and tried 0.7F and it's just as slow so must be a coincidence.

Continually pinging the web server doesn't keep the route open. I use Plusnet which is owned by BT.

1 192.168.1.26 Sheffield gig
2 192.168.1.1 Unknown
3 195.166.130.255 Unknown
4 213.120.163.20 Unknown
5 217.32.240.95 Unknown
6 213.121.192.110 Unknown host213-121-192-110.ukcore.bt.net
7 109.159.252.242 Sutton peer8-et-3-0-5.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net
8 195.99.126.65 Unknown
9 109.200.218.228 Unknown nlrtm1-rt001i.i3d.net
10 109.200.219.89 Unknown nlrtm1-rt113i.i3d.net
11 0.0.0.0 Unknown No Response
12 188.xxx.xx.xxx Unknown s12.lfs.net

I asked Victor but he is also puzzled, we can't really see why something that has been in the game and our site for so many years and has not changed in any way, might start to be a problem for some people. We are using simple http protocol, with no funny tricks.

He sent a couple of example links that you can try in Firefox:
These links are just as they would be accessed from LFS.

http://game.lfs.net/eventImage.php?name=dOH2RaLx.jpg
http://mods.lfs.net/cover.php?skinId=4FF048

Just to see if you have any trouble getting them in your browser (Firefox, so it doesn't complain about http).

You can create similar links by looking at image links on the event calendar or the skin id of mods.

E.g.
http://game.lfs.net/eventImage.php?name=BcYGEUfQ.png
http://mods.lfs.net/cover.php?skinId=FC0AAB


EDIT: One thing I wonder about is if the ISP (e.g. BT) might be doing deep packet searching. If so it would find "User-Agent: LFS" (rather than Firefox etc) and I just wonder if they might be doing throttling or traffic shaping (e.g. they could possibly think the requests come from a bot or crawler and not be legitimate traffic - I'm just making this up, I really have no idea). There's one tiny change you can make in LFS to remove a small item from the URL that it sends to our site. Although I find it extremely unlikely that it would make any difference, if you switch off "Allow regional downloads" it will not include "X-Caps: 1" in the URL (it's just a line telling our web server that LFS can allow redirections).

I haven't had time to test these because of my busy work schedule. I've done the tests now and haven't had any issues.

Quote from Scawen :

He sent a couple of example links that you can try in Firefox:
These links are just as they would be accessed from LFS.

I use Firefox and the "Don’t enable HTTPS-Only Mode" is broken on mine, I have to manually add sites in the exceptions or it just redirects to https. I tried the http links posted and had to wait 15+ seconds for them to load.


and "switch off "Allow regional downloads" made no difference.

Quote from o000o :

I tried the http links posted and had to wait 15+ seconds for them to load.

Well that is strange, they are only small files.

Let's see what result some of the other people come up with.

EDIT: If they also get slow downloads of those files in Firefox then it seems like we may have some sort of a clue.