@HeavyG Coincidence.

As to my guess, based on looking at my browser memory cache and toying around with closing windows, erasing history/cache and observing the behavior of the served Vanilla pages:

A Russian hacker named Shmirnoff_Jaqueoff bought an egg with a stolen credit card from the dark net.  The top broke in shipping (which was exorbitantly expensive).  The mother ship couldn't find a dealer to replace said part.  SJ developed yuuuge anger so he hacked the site and changed the war file on the server to generate the forum links on the left >>>> to replicate themselves in an endless loop. 

While Tomcat (server application) identifies and stops the endless loop, the list of forum topics fills up the "sandbox" on the browser (secured memory area sequestered by client) by an exponential factor.  After a few pages, which are all cached, the memory usage of the browser gets yuuuggge (mine was like 1.5 Gig) and the browser, especially if you have SSD (no disk cache/mirror for paging), refuses to load the whole page.

Shmirnoff_Jaqueoff anticipated a quick demise to the Vanilla forum, but it turned out to be a slow user experienced death.  SJ is into the bottom 5% of a liter of vodka so he doesn't know he partially failed, but a side effect is high memory usage of the web server, which also caches the served metadata.

To fix the problem, clear your browser cache, then reopen it to make sure you start a new session.  It will buy you some time, but ultimately, Vanilla needs to fix the corrupted Russian hack.