I'll preface this by saying that yes, I do use somewhat antiquated web browsers, which have caused me to develop all sorts of workarounds for sites that have more "cutting-edge" technology. I can't update my browsers, because to do that I'd have to upgrade my OS, which would mean I couldn't continue to play Sims 2. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm on a Mac, a MacBook Pro.
HOWEVER, up until a couple weeks ago, I had no problems whatsoever with MTS. Suddenly, whammo.

Exhibit A: When logged out, the page loads normally, as far as I can tell. I've been using auto-login, so for the last two years or so, I haven't really seen the website without being already logged in. But to my eyes, it looks okay (see first screenshot)

Exhibit B: (second screenshot) Logged in, everything's screwy. No images show, just "broken picture" icons. The site's familiar text displays in two "layers"...
The top layer has the features that move with a mouse scroll, including recent uploads, popular, picked and featured, etc. Also, the links that would normally be off to the right: Creativity forums, creator feedback, etc. Also, the disclaimers and contact links found at the bottom of the page. NONE OF THESE LINKS WORK, meaning they don't show up as links: mousing over them, the cursor remains arrow-shaped.

This layer moves as I scroll with the mouse wheel, sliding up and down over the top of a bottom layer, which contains the links normally found in the dropdown menus. THESE LINKS WORK, but the pages they link to are similarly borked as described above.

Exhibit C: This weirdness persists, no matter how I clear my history, cache, cookies, re-start the browser, do hard page refreshes, or anything else thus far suggested by my various MTS buddies. Hence this new thread, as suggested by simmer22.

Exhibit D (and this is the weirdest one): This funky display of the site occurs across all three of my web browsers: Chrome, Firefox and Safari. And ONLY on Modthesims; I'm able to get on PlumBobKeep and all my other usual Sims 2 haunts.

On my phone, everything is normal, which is how I'm able to post these threads.

I realize that I'm in a very small minority: Sims players who use Macs. So I'm more than happy to conduct whatever experiments to get to the bottom of this. It was literally working one day, and not the next. Some folks have described similar issues, but it sounds like they were temporary; this has gone on for a few weeks now.
Could I just use my phone (or my iPad) to search for downloads? Yeah, I could, and I've used that method in the past for sites that don't work so well with my old laptop browsers... it involves downloading, compressing (gmail on my iPhone won't attach rar files for some reason), and then emailing. Which only works if the compressed size is under 25Mb, naturally. And besides, using mobile devices to download content for a desktop game doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Possible, but painful.
Anywho... that's my sad story. I feel that, as a community, we can figure out what's wrong here, and fix it.

UPDATE: the login factor may be a red herring. Although the splash page looks okay, the links go to the same pages as when I'm logged in, and those are basically non-functional.

This is kinda unrelated to your problem, but:


The Sims 2 Super Collection, I assume? Or did you sideload Sims 2 through Bootcamp to get the missing expansion and stuff packs?

If it's about updating from Big Sur to Monterey, or somehow related to that update which forced Mac apps to go 64-bit to continue working... I haven't really heard of people experiencing problems after either update, and if they did, it was fixed by setting their display's refresh rate to 60 Hz. Similar thing goes for a hardware-related issue with the M1 chips, which was fixed in an update to the SC. You should be able to update just fine, if it's the SC you're using to play.

Actually, believe it or not, I'm running 10.8, Mountain Lion. I bought the Mac version of Seasons when it first came out, and recently, another 2 new copies of the DVD off EBay, in case the disc finally wears out. I've never had to use BootCamp for the Sims... because I'm fine with sticking with Seasons as my latest EP. I did make the mistake of getting OFB, but it can't be installed on my system.

The real reason for not moving to... whatever it is that follows Mountain Lion is Photoshop - I think I might have to migrate to some vile subscription-based Adobe cloud system, which I refuse to do. As for the Sims, will it work on Mac OS 10.9? Not sure. I do know that my web browsers cannot be updated under my current OS. But if the website was working fine until 2 weeks ago...
Was there a major website overhaul just after the new year? It's not like the security or clock errors I get from some sites, where the page won't load at all; this is different, and weird. Especially because it happens, regardless of which browser I'm using.

Anyway, to answer your question, I don't have the SC, or the UC - just the original Sims 2 DVD install, plus Nightlife, University and Seasons. I migrated the game from my old laptop via a terabyte hard drive, and - aside from self-inflicted issues of sketchy CC and vanishing households, I've never had a major problem. But you're right, this isn't helping solve the immediate website issue.

This looks like it's not loading the stylesheets or the javascript for the site. When the page is loaded like the second screenshot, can you press F12 and then next to the Filter field is a dropdown called "Default levels". Click that and then click both Info and Warnings. The console should now show only errors.

Take a photo of the errors and attach it and then we can see whats going on.

Thanks

Took a little research, but I figured it out... on a Mac, you press cmd-opt-i to bring up the developer tools, and the filters are under a little icon that maybe, if it were big enough to actually see, might look like a really weird type of coffee filter. Anywho, here's the photo.

Okay thanks, but yeah it works differently on Mac. Can you click the Errors there and show that? Thanks

Oh, sorry - I just clicked info & warnings before. Errors coming up...
Should I hide network messages? Because otherwise, it's a couple pages' worth.

Never mind... I just scrolled down and took 3 screen captures. But since I can't get on the page, really, I had to email them to myself for use on my phone; bear with me.

Okay, here's the three error screenshots

Okay so you definitely have something blocking the scripts that MTS uses. All those INSECURE RESPONSES shouldn't be happening, since it's https. I suspect you simply have an ad blocker or are blocking the domains that MTS uses, and that's causing the issue.

Well, I do have a pref set to block popups, but that's something I've always had, and the oddity with viewing MTS is a fairly recent phenomenon. I haven't changed any browser settings recently, I did just now add an exception on the popups for modthesims.info, but that didn't help. I'll try allowing universal popups... no, that had no effect either. I suppose I could go back to default browser settings, but... as I mentioned before, this is really the only site that I'm having the problem with, and it looks the same, whether I'm using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. I'd think if it were some faulty setting on my browser's prefs, or if I had activated an ad blocker inadvertently (is that even possible?), it would be affecting more than just this one website.
Anyhow, I'm at a complete loss here. It doesn't make sense that one day it would be okay, and the next not.
Anyone know what other part of my Chrome preferences I should check out, specifically? Or maybe Firefox? I mean, I don't particularly care which browser I use, other than I don't really like the Apple one.

New clues for the mystery...
I decided to rouse my old Chromebook from its hibernation, to see what MTS looked like on that. As you can see, it's more of the same: inactive links on one layer; active (but useless) ones on the other. I haven't touched this laptop for over a year - maybe two - so is it something on my Google account, affecting multiple devices, but only non-mobile browsers? (on my phone and my iPad, the website works fine, but downloading CC is a pain.)
But... the problem is the same in Safari and Firefox, so I really don't see how my Google prefs would have a bearing on that. And again, the issue seems to be only on MTS.
I've been through all the advanced settings in my Chrome, Safari and Mozilla preferences, and I really don't know what it could be. I haven't ever installed any sort of 3rd-party ad-blocking software, unless it was some sort of automatic Google thing, and I missed the memo. But I'd think others would've been plagued with this issue if that were true. Still hoping for a resolution... If I knew what to look for, or where to look for it, that'd be one thing. But I honestly don't have the foggiest notion.

Like I mentioned before, something is blocking the requests. On mobile browsers, are you using the same wifi network as your computers? It feels like there is some proxy/firewall/pihole blocking the requests.

This isn't something that I can really fix on the site side because like you said it's specific to your setup and your connection.

Yes, the same wifi router feeds all my devices, both mobile and desktop. I don’t have a firewall, and I haven’t found anything that looks like ad-blocking software or extensions installed anywhere. While I’m not suggesting it’s your job to fix anything, I can’t help but wonder if something in the website architecture changed recently, as - like I said - it was literally working for me one day, and then not the next day. You know, like upgrading something that would be beneficial to most site users… who aren’t still using browsers from 2012.

Could it be something to do with my Google Ads settings? Just now I’m remembering trying to mess around with those one day a while back, to avoid watching the same stupid commercial over and over while playing another game app. I didn’t successfully accomplish what I was trying to, but maybe I accidentally changed some setting that messed up my ability to see certain websites? I’m not having this issue with other websites, though - the ads are certainly everywhere else, so if it’s an adblocker, then it is ONLY blocking ads on MTS, which… seems a little unlikely.

Shrug.

The issue isn't with that though, it's literally not loading the stylesheets and your browser seems to think it's insecure, which it isn't. It's possible that it's too old and that Cloudflare's SSL certificate just doesn't work with such old hardware. But then you wouldn't be able to access the site at all and you wouldn't get the "Secure" in the address bar.

Whats interesting is that it's only subdomains that get blocked. If you look at your screenshot a few posts ago you'll see that requests to:

https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/
https://static.modthesims2.com/

Are both failing, but you can see the adstuff.js (which loads from the modthesims.info domain) does not get blocked. So this means that it's cross-site or sub-domains that fail for you.

What happens if you try going to this URL specifically: https://static.modthesims2.com/comb...s?v=20221215_01
or this one: https://static.modthesims2.com/imag..._logo_small.png

By the way the underlying server and website hasn't changed at all for quite a while, certainly not with SSL certificates or anything like that.

SO... while I never tried those links you suggested (apologies; and I'll do so presently)... today I clicked a MTS link from a page at PBK (just to get the URL, so I could go there on my phone, you understand), and whammo - I'm in. The page looks a little odd: it's kind of zoomed out, but it's been so long since I was able to access it on my laptop that maybe it was always set like that - I can't remember. Something is still a little off - there's a smaller inset window, within the main one, with its own scrollbar, but... inside that window, everything works like it used to. Maybe you can tell what I mean from the screenshot.

Now, on to following your links and seeing what happens. [breathing a moderately small sigh of belief].

The first link pulled up a page full of javascript, I'm guessing. I couldn't understand any of it, but a glance at the developer tools tab showed no errors, so I'm guessing it loaded correctly. (see screenshot)

The second one pulled a page with a picture of a little blue lightbulb in the upper lefthand corner, which seems correct also.

Of course, this is quite a long time after you asked me to test these links, so who knows what would've happened if I'd done it promptly.

Update: AND NOW, all of a sudden, it's back to full-screen view. So weird. I'm keeping this thread open, just in case, but for now, it's "fixed", whatever "it" was.

Okay so other than the site-within-an-iframe issue (not sure how you got that to happen btw!) everything actually looks actually ok. You're loading in the correct theme and the colours look fine.

What happens if you just try using the site as normal today?