We definitely feel your pain 3seasons cause we get the same time-outs, delays and endless cycling too. This has been an ongoing chronic problem for the last 6 months to a year or so. Admin knows about it, is working on it and we've been waiting. We've complained about it several times and asked for updates on when they expect the problem to get fixed. We've been told they are working on it but don't know for certain how long it will take as they don't have the problem figured out yet. It's obviously frustrating for all of us and hopefully it gets fixed soon.
Now as for the spammers, that is in some ways a harder problem for some of the reasons previously mentioned. On the surface, you would think what the heck--I add those spammers to my spam filter on my email and it pretty much handles the problem. With HNI's "member based" website, we are physically removing the spammer's "member status" so their spambots get the return message that their account has been deleted or is not valid, etc. when they try to send spam to HNI. As you can imagine, that really cuts down their turnaround time for figuring out that they need to create a new spam membership at HNI.
I and most of the mods are not programmers so I would have to defer the technical part of the answer to admin's programmers. However, I can tell you that most of the mods spend a lot of their time deleting spam as quickly as we hear about it. Unfortunately, this means we spend most of our time on HNI just responding to complaints about spam and not very much time just posting as members and enjoying HNI as a member. It also means that we spend less time reading all of the topics so we're often not as aware of flame wars, etc. as would would like to be.
I hope the programmers get this figured out, both for the spam and the time-outs, etc. HNI is a really unique place that many of us enjoy for a variety of reasons.
Cal