I have a reasonable connection, but Pelican?
 

Takes 3 minutes to load one page of the 2 spaces dirtbag parking w/o skipping back to the top when I scroll. Sheesh. I've learned to avoid that thread. Random pics thread? No prob. Oh, but the .gif thread? No fruggin way ever.

We had some issues with the forum earlier in the day, but everything seems to have been resolved. I would try refreshing the Pelican site/forum and re-logging in.

Any thread full of pictures is going to be slow. Each gif is actually a collection of a bunch of pics, kind of like an old school flip-book, so even though they are usually small, you may be loading 10, 20 or 100 of each image. There may be some intelligence in the apps that save them as a single file to not save each full copy, but only save the pixels that change, but it's still going to be a ton of data per pic. Also, gifs even when they aren't animated are generally larger than comparable jpgs.