Probably to reduce bandwidth, etc. TBH, I know Victor's said in the past that bandwidth usage doesn't worry him, so I'm expecting this to be more to reduce cpu and disk load on the box, as things like that can be "expensive" to generate.
Personally I'm just as interested, if not more so, to see how much data the boxes are pushing, and what level of concurrency they're getting, etc. (Victor if you're willing to share, you know where to find me )
They seem to have blocked the 'goto last post' shortcut too. In firefox it asks to download showthread.php (just a blank page in dreamweaver) and in Internet Explorer it says 'The page cannot be displated'.
It would appear that the LFS Forums only run on Apache 1.3.27. This means that it runs on a non-threaded, pre-forking web server, which is very dependant on the configuration setup (i.e. once it hits MaxClients the connections just sit waiting), and the hardware. More so than a threaded version of Apache (i.e. 2.x which can be setup as prefork, worker, or event). Of course, since the forums use PHP, threaded setup's aren't such a good choice at the moment, even with ZTS
I'm sure that this forum server isn't that beefy either, so what with the PHP scripts running, the hammering its taking on disk performance from all the DB queries, and what I can only assume to be no caching implemented, it would die