In the thread about things you hate on the SDMB, yellowval posted this:
Amen to all that. I absolutely cannot stand any sort of animations at all on a forum, as my eye is invariably and continually distracted by movement of any sort, which is 3x as annoying when I am actually trying to type a post. Smilies can work in moderation (one per post to punctuate a particularly cogent comeback) but not dozens of them.
To stave off any possible inter-board conflict, I ask that posters to this thread please avoid linking to other boards. If anyone wants to provide specific examples of another board’s relative shittiness, please use eloquent descriptions to paint a tapestry of words. Or something.
On one of the forums I frequent, a prolific poster has a gigantic banner in his sig. It’s big enough to introduce the dreaded horizontal scrollbar on my computer. I had to use Firefox’s “block all pictures from this domain” feature to get rid of it.
The kicker? The picture is from Wikimedia Commons. So now when I browse Wikipedia, I no longer see any pictures. :smack:
There are other forums? Why?
Folks who use the “ticker” banners… graphic displays of how far along their fetus is, how old their child is, how much weight they’ve lost… sometimes all three in one signature!
Too many smilies, which leads to smilie abuse, i.e. posts that look like this 
:mad: 
blah blah blah :eek: 
:o wah wah wah :smack: :dubious:, only much more annoying. And how many kitty cat smilies does a non-cat board need, anyway?
Obscene pictures used as avatars, mostly because that means I can’t surf there at work.
Bizarre color schemes, like PURPLE backgrounds with MAGENTA fonts, that make it hard to read.
An OP being able to go back and edit their original post to change their story, or eliminate it completely, if it doesn’t go the way they expect, leaving 3 - 4 pages of screaming invective directed at nothing. People being able to stealth edit their posts, so you can’t prove they changed their story.
I don’t mind avatars. I sorta like them, even the dancing ones, as long as they’re small.
I don’t like sig lines, especially banner ads and sig lines that aren’t set off from a post.
On one board (which has a lot of authors), you’ll find posts where people are commiserating about a tragedy, and right under “I’m so sorry for your loss” is “We don’t want no trouble, we just want your dog” or a banner ad for somebody’s book.
On another board, in the “What are you reading?” threads, some people post gigantic photos of the book cover. I don’t like that either, and it’s not just because I don’t know how to do it.
Ditto on funky color schemes and graphics overload.
Couldn’t you just adblock that one image and not everything from the Wikipedia addess?
I hate huge sig pics and large avatars that change the formatting of the board.
Animated smileys
Avatars
Any kind of animation in the posts
Sigs that are larger than the post (and are inevitably used every single time the poster says anything)
Large pictures
Anything whatsoever that makes me have to use the horizontal scroll bar. I loathe the horizontal scroll bar.
I hate boards that make it so that sigs aren’t set apart from the actual text of the post in any way, making me start to read them each time thinking it’s a continuation of the post. The IMDB boards are really, really bad for this (no link needed; browse any one of them). It always looks like this -
Those avatars that are big eyed dolls meant to look like the poster. There are a bunch of sites to make them, and you can dress them and give them cute props like purses and cats.
Huge photos of Johnny Depp in sig lines. Huge photos in general in sig lines, but especially Johnny Depp. I have nothing against him as an actor or sex symbol, but I get tired of looking at him.
Oh! And also, “I’m in yr blank blanking your blank.”
The standards of discussion are so significantly lower on just about every other message board out there that I get culture shock. I can’t think of the last time someone seriously posted here in IM-speak (kan u?) and if someone posts something completely loopy (not just trollish, but things like 9/11 conspiracy theories) around here it tends to get taken apart fast. Just about every other message board I encounter I feel like I’m trying to deal with thirteen year olds with ADD.
Zjestika, do you mean the South Park avatars? Yeah I hate those too-hey Cartman wannabee you missed the trend by about 7 years…
Inter-inter-inter quoting. Drives me BATTY. example here.
Actually, no, but that would annoy me too. I’m thinking more of pretty girl dolls, as seen on this doll-making site.
A certain woodworking forum I infrequently haunt had a poster whose avatar was a picture of a stacked woman’s chest with a flimsy top and no bra, bouncing up and down. It was highly distracting. The mods told him to remove it due to frequent complaints about it being NSFW. He refused to comply. They removed it forcibly. He stormed out of the forum whining about free speech and censorship. Sadly, he knew heaps about woodworking and was very helpful and a nice guy. Bit of a shame, all round.
Pretty much what I was going to say. I mainly lurk on a certain misspelt profanity, finding the 10% of meaningful or humorous comments among piles of dross. Most of which seems to be drive-by postings from people who don’t have the attention span to read the whole thread.
/Mainly looks at Fark for the pictures
Really? Unless it’s a whole bunch of really, really long posts quoted in their entirety, I’d prefer nested quotes like that- it makes it easier to follow the thread of a conversation. I have much more of a problem with someone quoting an entire OP to add two words to a discussion.
Viewed as an internet-wide annoyance, but I can’t get enough of the guy: kathaksung. I would sponser his SDMB membership if he ever found his way over here.
It’s not so bad when it’s linking up disparate posts throughout a thread, but when it’s essentially the last four, six, or nine posts that appear sequentially in the thread, that you JUST read, it resembles something more like the latter part of your sentence. It’s like having a group discussion with a ceaseless echo in the room. It wastes space on the page and doesn’t contribute anything - it’s just noise.