Problems using this site

Question

I may well have posted this in the wrong place but given the nature of the problem, I hope this will be tolerated.
This site underwent a facelift fairly recently and since then I have found it almost unusable; in fact it was only through hammering at my keyboard that I managed to make a post yesterday which ended up duplicated - but I will return to that.
For a day or so, every time I have logged on, I the site has ground to a halt - literally. I could browse to my heart's content until I entered my username and password and then it went dead. The Safari progress bar stopped about 15% of the way along. If I left the window open, I would eventually get a page with a yellow Post-It™ graphic saying something about the site being under maintenance - yet it would work perfectly well until I logged in.
I had pretty much the same experience using Firefox which is vanilla so I eliminated all my Safari extensions from suspicion even though I had tried it with them disabled.
At some point, I managed to find my way to a New Post page but not without dozens of refreshes, log-ins and log-outs. Unfortunately, having spent half an hour typing it up (the topic is a problem with slow text input in Mail and Safari), I hit the Post button but got an error because I had not entered the name of the Community. I tried several guesses but there were no hints, pop-up menus or anything - I had to try to type a Community name from memory verbatim! When I tried to open another page to look for the name of an appropriate Community, I was wading through a swamp again in terms of pages not loading etc. I assume that when the page functions as it should, there is a choice of Community. With the post I am typing now, there is no Community field.
I did eventually get a question posted but having had the earlier problems, I copied the post to my clipboard just in case it disappeared into the ether when I hit the Post button. The first one did - so I pasted it into another New page and did it again.
However, my post did not appear and my log-in issues continued. It wasn't until about 18 hours later that I managed to find it and realised that it had been posted twice.
Now I find that my posts' pages are not loading properly and that I cannot un-Follow or delete either of the posts. As the page loads, I see a gear wheel icon appear with the word 'Actions' momentarily (only sometimes) next to Following and Bookmark at the top right - but it is a fraction of a second before it disappears. 'Actions' may include delete post but I don't know. If I click the tick above Following nothing happens. The status bar just shows 'Go to # on this page'.
I have spent so much time trying to navigate this site to ask a simple question which relates to my not being able to use the site that I feel physically sick with anxiety. It's like some Kafkaesque mind game. I have tried five browsers; Safari, Firefox, Opera, Torch and Chrome - none work and as I have mentioned, I have tried with all extensions disabled.
I am hoping that when I hit the Post button this time, I am not sent into another browser coma. I'll have copied the text just in case.

Answer 1

Here is my ASC work flow...
1) I login.
2) Start an auto reloader.
Unless you do something every thirty minutes you get logged out.  The forum software waits to tell you this as long as it can to keep you in suspense  ;-) .
I use Firefox and ReloadEvery.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reloadevery/
You need to pick a page that will reload over time without stalling out. It's ASC.  I've found my profile display the best to use. I get my Profile page after some  logins.  It's ASC.  Change rccharles to your apple id.
https://discussions.apple.com/people/rccharles?view=discussions
3) I open another window to do my normal ASC browsing.
4) I have a FireFox bookmark to goto the discussions that I have participated in. I've modified it to add on the content stuff.
         turingtest2 recommends. Change rccharles to your apple id:  
https://discussions.apple.com/people/rccharles/content?filterID=participated~obj ecttype~objecttype%5Bthread%5D
5) Use turingtest2's generated links with the /content suffix as browser bookmark to the ASC discussions: 
Site map of Communities and Categories
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2463
6) I run with Hiroto's modification to user content.  This is the only way these forums are readable for me.  How to adjust the format and layout of ASC Web Pages:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-7501
7) Read and answer my old posts.  I kind of memorize the time I last posted. ( It's way bad that apple eliminated the last poster to a thread. )
8) I use tabbed browsering.  From a list of discussions, hold down the command key then click on the link. You get two tabs this way. The original window will keep where you have been.
Robert