heck - I can open MOAB on dial up - you just do it with the paged version - takes hardly longer then a normal thread.

Ah, but the paged version uses about 64 bytes for each link to each page. A page is (I think) 50 posts. That means that the 'index' of pages at the top of the pages for this thread will be far bigger than the pages themselves. How long each page will take to load is left as an exercise for the reader.