Website Pet Peeves

[A Casual Fitz]

My number 1 website pet peeve is when I'm googling a news story and the site has a full article about the topic, but decides that it needs an automatically loading video clip at the top with some douche saying exactly what the article says. Half of the time I go back right away when I see this and find another site. What are your biggest website pet peeves?

 

[Crono]

Slideshows, newsletter subscription popups, infinite scrolling, autoplay videos, tracking elements, pay walls, and native advertising. Not necessarily in that order.

 

[dualsmp]

Sites that still use Flash.

 

[turtile]

In addition to the above: Web pages that having nothing to do with the page title (and shows up in Google). Websites that hide all useful information. Like a restaurant web page where you can't find the hours or menu without clicking at least five times.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Modals are my #1 pet peeve. It's those javascript based gray out screen popups that take over the entire page. Makes me rage. Worse is the delayed ones, so you're reading an article and then it's like "FUCK YOU!" right in your face.

Another one that seems to be getting worse is headers or other elements that overlay on top of the page. Essentially they eat up screen space for nothing and in some cases even block parts of the site. On similar trend a very specific one I keep seeing is where they put those stupid social media buttons on the side of an article, and it actually blocks the text. Like this:



In general though my major pet peeve is the overuse of javascript and overly bloated sites. The Home Depot and Canadian Tire sites are great example of too much bloat. When you first start to type something to search for, you then have to retype because some stupid thing caused the page to reload and clear your search in the middle of typing because it is so bloated that it was still doing some BS processing in the background even after it loaded. Modern web design in general has turned into complete garbage. I hate googling for any subject as it involves landing on all these random sites and I'd say 90% of them have these annoying elements.

 

[pyonir]

Infinite scroll. Holy hell do I despise infinite scroll.

 

[tynopik]

sites that require 20 exceptions in noscript to work
sites that slow computer to a crawl without noscript

 

[lxskllr]

sites that require 20 exceptions in noscript to work
sites that slow computer to a crawl without noscript

This is a good summation. JS is the devil, and the horrible interface/speed of these very forums is a great example.

 

[Ken g6]

My number 1 website pet peeve is when I'm googling a news story and the site has a full article about the topic, but decides that it needs an automatically loading video clip at the top with some douche saying exactly what the article says. Half of the time I go back right away when I see this and find another site. What are your biggest website pet peeves?

Sites that still use Flash.

Sites that have an auto loading Flash video, but when that Flash is blocked by NoScript auto load an HTML 5 video instead. I'm looking at you ESPN!

Modals are my #1 pet peeve. It's those javascript based gray out screen popups that take over the entire page. Makes me rage. Worse is the delayed ones, so you're reading an article and then it's like "FUCK YOU!" right in your face.

I don't mind modals so much. I find em with firebug and kill em with a user style.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Sites that have an auto loading Flash video, but when that Flash is blocked by NoScript auto load an HTML 5 video instead. I'm looking at you ESPN!

I don't mind modals so much. I find em with firebug and kill em with a user style.

Isin't that only going to work for that one site though? They are typically an issue when googling for something which means you will be landing on a different site each time. So anything that can block them on a per site basis is kinda useless. I hope at some point ad blockers can manage to detect those and block them out completely.

 

[eelw]

White text on black background. Refuse to view them. Not going to see spots to read your stupid page.

 

[A Casual Fitz]

White text on black background. Refuse to view them. Not going to see spots to read your stupid page.

Not a big Maddox fan?

 

[dullard]

Infinite scroll. Holy hell do I despise infinite scroll.

Infinite scroll is bad, but I really hate websites that put important controls at the bottom of an infinite scroll (Microsoft Bing image search for example). You need to scroll quickly and then you have a fraction of a second to perfectly click on the control before the infinite scrolling portion moves it down off your screen.

 

[cbrunny]

When the AT forums jump while the ad bars load. Really, this is my biggest complaint about the internet right now.

I lead a sad and lonely life.

 

[nakedfrog]

Pretty much everything listed. But especially infinite scroll.

 

[Nashemon]

Slideshows that rerun all their scripts and load new ads on every new slide. Or just slideshows in general, really.
Websites that pop up a message saying "DON'T GO" just because I move my mouse to the top of the screen.
Anything with audio that I don't explicitly tell to run.

 

[MtnMan]

Pale blue text on pale gray background

 

[Stopsignhank]

You do a Google search, click on a link, then the site will not let you hit the back button to go back to the search results. Really you assholes, you are going to make me close the tab and then open a new one to redo the same Google search?

 

[TheGardener]

My number 1 website pet peeve is when I'm googling a news story and the site has a full article about the topic, but decides that it needs an automatically loading video clip at the top with some douche saying exactly what the article says. ?

Deleting Flash from my pc solved part of the problem. But autoloads of video in HTML were irritating me to no end. I posted in another forum [maybe Software], and I was given a link which had a solution. Tried it in Firefox and it worked. Only drawback is that if I want to watch a video, I have to click 3 times to get it to start. Small price to pay. Sorry I don't know what I did, or where that link to the website is. I think the solution was in the config file.

My website pet peeve is their using gray fonts on a white background. Most commonly found on privacy or legal statements. They really don't want you to be able to read it.

 

[Feneant2]

My 2 pet unforgivable peeves:
- Auto play videos, nothing like opening CNN at 6:30 and it starts blasting a friggin explosion from a random video
- Tell us what you think- these surveys, whoever invented those should be line up and shot, then get the spirits resurrected through science so we may make them suffer for eternity.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

White text on black background. Refuse to view them. Not going to see spots to read your stupid page.

Da Fuq? So you're a fan of this new shit forum style of black on white? Ugh, too much light on the screen, waste of energy as well.

 

[Nashemon]

You do a Google search, click on a link, then the site will not let you hit the back button to go back to the search results. Really you assholes, you are going to make me close the tab and then open a new one to redo the same Google search?

Been complaining about that for years. But you shouldn't need to close the tab. Just right-click the back button and choose the first item that doesn't have random jibberish in it.

 

[A Casual Fitz]

Been complaining about that for years. But you shouldn't need to close the tab. Just right-click the back button and choose the first item that doesn't have random jibberish in it.

Yeah, I do that. It doesn't stop me from hating the website that made me do it, though.

 

[rh71]

Slideshows that actually load a whole new page
Clickbait links at the end of articles, especially on mobile that makes up half the scroll length (looking at you AP)

 

[rh71]

Da Fuq? So you're a fan of this new shit forum style of black on white? Ugh, too much light on the screen, waste of energy as well.

I, like many others, went to the experimental style where it's black on light blue (what AT used to be). Not many people like black text on full white background either.

White text on black background hurts the eyes after a few minutes for me and obviously I'm not alone.