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.
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 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.
For those who have got consistent slow downloads of skins, mods, mods browser and event list in LFS:
We are trying to establish what could be the cause. It seems particularly strange in the UK, where connections are good and our servers are located just across the sea in the Netherlands.
Known UK users with the issue are o000o, Zero7, Cimanu, Boypower, ka darai
TEST 1: This test was to see if there is some issue with plain http, between your ISP and our servers.
Using Firefox so you can view http (not https) visit the 'LX skinning competition' and see if the images and skins download at normal speed: http://competition.lfs.net/lx_skinning/
Results so far: those people who could visit it, reported no issue.
TEST 2: This test is to get closer to what LFS does in game.
I meant slow as in a delay before the page loaded, not 56k slow, line at a time. I tried the links you posted, some came immediately, two had a long delay before loading including http://competition.lfs.net/lx_skinning/ which after a long delay redirected to https://www.lfs.net as I hadn't added it to the exceptions list in Firefox.
Trying the below tests, using Firefox, with BT connection. I have checked and confirmed that mod list is still broken for me at the time of these tests.
Test 1: No issues opening the link (Firefox of course warns that it is http), no issues with any of the images. Everything loads fast.
I'm having the same issue.. probably since the last update as well.. i remember a bit of a mod list meltdown on I think a friday night a while ago, and ever since its just been slow, as if you're waiting your turn in a queue for everyone else to download the mod. Skins also fail to download at times. I've been patient but its starting get quite annoying.
It has also been proved that if you use a different internet connection, the problem goes away.
So the problem, for the UK users, appears to be BT. The only possibility I can think of is that they are restricting http traffic from sources they don't understand. LFS connects with a "user agent" called "LFS" rather than "Firefox" etc. So maybe BT suspects it is a bot or web crawler. This is speculation.
Seeing as it's pretty much only BT users that have this issue, the ideal people to fix the issue would be BT, if they would kindly avoid traffic shaping that would be appreciated.
Alternatively we can try experimenting, so that LFS 'spoofs' its user agent to try to appear like Firefox. But I am seriously much too busy, currently working on average 12 hour days to try and get this release finished, so I can't start messing around now trying to get around BT's traffic shaping.
In recent weeks the mod retrieval/loading list in pits has been average, nothing spectacular but also not laggy. In regards to mods however, one thing that's noticeable as a constant is that first entry into a server heavy on mods usage - the cars take minimum 5s to load in - everything's frozen and all cars are circle dots (mod desync). Myself I haven't had the mod list lag for over a month, but when it does occur it will crap out for at least 2 days.
But what's bugging me right now (as I'm writing this reply) is that the issues with the master server is still not resolved - MP out of stash space + constant timeouts; but LFS.net and all associated pages (including in-game mod retrieval list) load just fine. I'm getting this now when loading into servers, and entering the more active servers like TC / JAR / FF the user connection list is flickering like a Christmas tree...
.... so just to bring it up again, that my issue's still being ignored - https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/2105295#post2105295 . Since 2022 when the issue first occurred, I've changed between two ISP now and both had the same issues, occurring in greater frequency every year. Every month there are random days where LFS simply doesn't connect. C'mon, there has to be some proper answer to this that isn't just a lame blanket "your ISP / your country / EU undersea cable" reply.
It's not just me. It's plenty more people. It's not our ISP or network issue. It's probably (like you mentioned) not even due to the 0.7 update.
It's your provider that's hosting your master server and everything around it. If they're saying nothing's changed or everything's fine on their end, you're being sold a lie. Having a big nice update to LFS is cool and fantastic, but it means jack if we don't have stable connection infrastructure, irregardless if it's laggy mod retrieval or a janky master server.
