Describe the worst forum you've ever seen

An experienced forum owner can often take one look at a site and see subtle problems that will affect the community down the line, but sometimes a forum is so terrible in form or structure that any newbie would be instantly repulsed. In your travels around the Internet, what forums have you visited that were so hideous you couldn't believe anyone actually thought they were ok? You don't have to link to them (the point is not to embarrass or upset anyone), just describe it in all it's eye-searing glory

 

Flashy images, Bright colours, colours which do not match.

Eugh.

 

.... OH GOD, you made me remember that horrid skin again ;~;

 

I cant think of the worst one I have seen right now but it was probably a badly set up and looking gaming forum.

 

ROFL!! The one I was thinking. I wanted to gauge my eyes out.

 

One site weighed in at over 4 megs.

On another site, the background color and text where so close you could not read anything.

The username, password, email fields where the same color at the text.

Bright flashy ads that took forever to load.

Captcha did not work on another site.

Only to name a few examples

 

Four megs? How is that even possible?

I'm afraid I've been guilty of that one, unknowingly of course. Changed human verification methods as soon as I found out.

 

There's been quite a few, it's either awful members or looks awful, there's also been some that for some reason decided to put a background song on their forum that's really loud...

 

The ones that look like they were skinned in MS Paint.

 

Yeah, that's the thing with gaming sites. Any 12-year old that has access to a computer can setup a forum, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can make it look pleasant. Gaming has a knack for being caught with the worst organized forums on the web.

What the hell? I didn't think there could be any logical way someone could do such a thing, with any script, regardless of compression. That's just unacceptable.

 

too many sections, most have few posts, some of which are pretty pointless and the members werent sure what to post in them.

forum descriptions in text talk

a section for guests, but they hadnt set permissions for guests to see them

default skin with a very poorly designed banner that looked like a child did it

power mad, slightly insane admin

cliquey set of mods who werent helpful to members

 

I've seen multiple personally. Any forum running some old threaded forum software probably comes top here, as do half the forums I see on Invisionfree and Proboards. One on the former had forums for every possible franchise ever on a Nintendo system (I can't remember, it was for character suggestions for a Smash Bros game or something). But it had about 2000 forums, all completely empty. And the default style. Why they were thinking, I'll never know.

There's also various others. The one I mentioned here is a good example:

http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ge...iendly-forums-all-time-1729/index2/#post47741

The manager of this place was pretty much power obsessed to put it nicely. There's a very choice quote about not caring about copyright infringement too, and I kinda feel sorry for the person who's reviews were taken wholesale:

[Stuff about how said person should be happy his work is being used on said site because said site is apparently ten times better and more popular than the person's website]

And then about adding the content...

As for other sites which are bad on technical reasons or such like... I'm not sure. I know quite a few sites which are just cliques that hate new users and mock them endlessly. I know one site in particular which has nearly zero content... but every single modification from vBulletin.org installed... It's extremely sad to look at, especially when you've got a general forum with things like a clock and a helpdesk attached to it. For that matter... any forum which was bought and killed by bad management. Another admin site I used to visit had this, and dropped to about ten posts a day due to the staff not visiting at all. Not to mention half the sites Internet Brands apparently buys, where they change things without care for the member base, and suddenly a three million post forum becomes a ghost town.

 

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