[cheat-master30]

Originally Posted by dismas

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.