There is a post somewhere on the STM website that, as I understand it, explains that the company that supplied the forum software was taken over and support for the forum software ended at the takeover. Hence I couldn't access the site for several weeks because of a bug in unsupported software that STM had to go to some lengths to get fixed.
The site still sucks though, why they couldn't choose something like the software for this forum or the arduino forum or a million others that work well I don't know.