I've noticed if I google search the forums and go to them through that link, sometimes it's as if the link is taking me to a different cached version of the forums or something.

Like if I google right now "sims 4 forums," the top 2 results are "The Sims 4 General Discussions — The Sims Forums" (forums.thesims.com/en_us/categories/the-sims-4-general
) and "The Sims Forums" (forums.thesims.com/). You would think these are the same thing, but if I click on the first one right now, it takes me to a forum where I'm not signed in and I get frequent maintenance error messages. If I click on the second one, I'm signed in as I should be and no error messages.

I can only guess that it has something to do with cached web pages? I don't understand how though because the root URL is the same. I can only find one noticeable difference in the URLs when using them and that's that the "functioning as normal" version has "en_US" (US in all caps) and the other one has "en_us" (us in all lowercase).