Major things that annoy you online?
 

As in, mainly forums but also can be websites, chat, wikis, etc.

For me, it is generally these things:

Websites

Overuse of flash. It seems every major web designer now has an obsession with flash and non labelled navigation; moving stuff etc and seems to avoid HTML. It's annoying me for quite a few reasons, some being non bookmarking, others the mystery meat navigation often used and also the fact Google's translator does not translate text in this format.

Pop ups. And worse, spyware filled ads that some ad networks seem to actually allow. Stupid malware. I wish the creators of such stuff were given a life sentence in prison.

Myspace. Myspace for how many profiles are so badly designed and coded.

Bad web design. I don't mean quite bad. Or decent. Or average. I mean the really, really bad attempts in FrontPage or *shudder* Word with broken code, marquees and blinking text and maybe even the whole site made entirely from pictures with no alt text. Those that take like 23 minutes to download (not joking, beware if you have dial up).

Webmasters who quit. Or those which abandon a site, leave it running with no manager and it ends up with them and their staff last visiting three years prior and has become a literal civil war/anarchy situation.

General Forums

Those with nearly no features at all. Which are basically like a web based Usenet group and are entirely text based. Often with a long guide saying not to suggest anything that would make the site seem more modern.

Those with too much stuff. And which uses goes into double/triple navigation bars.

How big forums sometimes become police states and entirely for monetary profit rather than community. I've seen such forums where donators basically become moderators with powers to give infractions to people. And such where avatars/signatures/BB code/whatever are only for paying members. Or those where you must be there over a year and a half to edit your post.

Register to view based forums. Or those with registration only to view the topics. Kind of explanatory.

Internet Privacy Act stuff. Everyone should know it's a total myth and does not exist. However, it seems every site with slightly questionable legality is just taken in by this and has it in the Terms of Service. Must admit though, very, very good way to tell if a site is legal or not.

Multiple releases of the same thing. Or how every minor mod seems to get released multiple times by multiple members. For no real reason. I mean, count the number of Youtube video mods here...

Default styles. Also companies that just frame the default in their site layout.

Colour swap pre-mades. It seems 90% of pre made skins are basically palette swaps of the same base skin. Very much a problem with free skin/style websites online though more than for paid styles.

Community Spirit

Xenophobes. The older veterans which seem to think all newbies are bad and should be shunned away forever.

Leaving topics. Seriously, every member I saw ever that announced they were leaving has returned. Often very shortly after they actually left.

How totally random spam often gets more popular than the intelligent topics. What made me implement someone heres Topickill modification.

overuse flash, not if you actually know it and where and when to use it?

obsession? certified addition! Yup.

Flex2 and the next generation of media rich sites, count me as one of the fanatics.

I am more then happy to leave the plain text HTML brown bag sites to others.

However I do agree with most of the rest of your post :)

_V

I don't say flash is bad. There are good uses for it that cannot be done with HTML. However, I do think more flash based sites should realise that content is still important, so actually having a decent amount of images/video/text to keep a visitor interested and informed would be good. I've seen sites which do this well, and I've also seen sites which expect visitors to stay at a flash site with just one video and a flash based game rather than any actual informational content.

Okay, I have another one to add to the list, and that is Google's flood limit. It's extremely low, stops anyone searching at a decent rate (or using it to efficently search a single site) and I keep running into it since I read faster than many people.


http://www.dsultimate.net/photoplog/...damngoogle.jpg

My number one pet peeve lately is links opening in new windows when I don't want them to. I'm fine with links in forum posts opening in a new window since you're leaving the site in order to visit that link. But when the content is on the same site, it's annoying. vb.org is actually one of the places that's guilty of this. If you go to a members hacks to see what they done, you get a new window. Why? You're still at vb.org!

godaddy does this a lot too. By the time you get to what you want to look at in your account, you have three or four windows open.

Second on my all time list is auto playing music or sounds. If I'm listening to music while surfing, it makes for a lot of noise when stuff starts playing in a browser window. If I'm not listening to anything else, then it scares the crap out of me when my speakers start blaring some ad or some song that someone thought sounded cool on their web site.

The first one is annoying, yes. But the second one if far more annoying. And the more you browse free hosted sites or badly designed ones, the more this is the case. Seriously, would it hurt some of these people to make the music play only if you click the 'play' button at very LEAST? Or maybe just have a music page?

Two more things I have remembered I hate are:

Links to non HTML files (more precisely, anything that does not easily open in the browser window). Like unmarked PDF files, or any PowerPoint/Word/Excel files some person thought would be great to put online and link to with no warning. Worse when the navigation does not say where you're going.

Prompts, Alerts and .htaccess log in annoyances. Having the third is fine when you want it, not so much when it disrupts what you are doing. For example, playing music in another tab? Soon as you hit the .htaccess protected page... BANG, the music stops dead. Playing an online flash game? Lose all control and basically get Game Over as it brings focus to the tab with the protected page prompt. Yes, really annoying when trying to play say... Copter in the other tab. It also ruins reading articles, posting on forums, etc...

Prompts and 'password protection' in Javascript. Yeah, they work for the very, very stupid people online, but anyone with half a brain just disables Javascript. I even read how a pay site did this... as it's only protection against those who did not pay reading content.

Oh, and does anyone wonder why I have so much to rant at? Because I am probably too curious to read random sites linked to from other sites linked to from other sites etc... And have seen most of the stuff first hand.

I also remember the horrors from searching for something among free hosted sites and ending up going through 200+ websites filled with broken design, badly coded pages and every bad thing under the sun.

Links that don't open in new windows annoy the hell out of me, I really hate losing my place on a page because clicking some link has directed that page elsewhere.

I really hate Firefox

Obviously there are many contrasting opinions on this.

*Re Reads what you just said*. Yep, he said he hates Firefox. Got to admit, never saw that before or expected that to be posted. Ever.

Get Firefox (or IE for that matter...and probably of the other browsers) and click the scroll wheel.

I hate pop-ups I want to click a link I want to see that stuff when I want to, I don't want to be forced to read the new page after I clicked the link.
You have to admit though it feels good when you can use your knowledge to beat the a site.
Have you never thought to read the status bar when you hover over a link? I even do when I'm not looking for something these days.
I just generally hate anything that doesn't work in FireFox, the odd bit of flash that takes years to load but has the only method of navigation within it and 2 minutes of intro and finally sites that load slow my tolerance has gone down over the years if I can't see text within 1-10 seconds I'm gone :D