Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Forums
Raised as a usability problem by 42 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2012–2024), in 32 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Forum search is poor and mobile interface no longer worksUnreviewed
20122026- Forums are cumbersome on phones: typing is hard and catching up on long threads is unpleasant2024-09-12
- Forum search is poor and the mobile interface no longer works2021-09-16
- Forum text is cut off on mobile, with content too wide to scroll into view2018-03-08
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 43 complaints
- Early forums had horrible UIs and high latency2024-11-11
- Forums are cumbersome on phones: typing is hard and catching up on long threads is unpleasant2024-09-12
- Ctrl+F replaced by a custom search that only searches the entire topic, not the displayed page2024-03-08
- Must visit each forum separately to see updates; no unified feed2024-01-14
- Too much noise between pages to scroll through, huge signatures, quoting prior posts2023-12-08
- Two-digit year dates like 08/11/02 are confusing to read2023-10-14
- Forums have less intuitive UX than centralised chat platforms2023-09-20
- Notifications keep appearing in the corner and the user can't turn them off2023-08-27
- Forum interfaces are inconsistent and often poorly designed2023-06-09
- Forums need separate logins, scattered notifications, inconsistent layouts, and quoting duplicates images2023-03-08
- Password rules shown one at a time, so users must retry repeatedly to learn all requirements2023-02-17
- Minimal navigation and pagination buttons make long forum threads hard to move through2023-02-06
- Content hidden behind sign-up, so users can't find or read it without registering2023-02-06
- Older forum software has bad UX that people don't want to deal with2022-08-14
- Browser find only covers loaded posts, with no clear sign of how far it reaches2022-07-22
- Clicking a thumbnail forces an login prompt even though the image is already visible2022-07-20
- Clicking a thumbnail in a forum post forces a login even though the image is already visible2022-07-20
- Forum interfaces are too compact for modern displays or poorly modernized2022-06-29
- Avatars and signatures add noise, making conversations harder to follow2021-11-18
- Forum interfaces are poorly designed and hard to use2021-11-18
- Chinese net is hard to navigate, so western users don't find it2021-10-05
- Must create a separate account for every forum, which feels clunky and disconnected2021-09-18
- Post and reply boundaries are too faint to tell apart, and profile photos waste mobile space2021-09-16
- Forum search is poor and the mobile interface no longer works2021-09-16
- Forum search is heavy, hidden behind sign-up walls, and only does poor keyword matching2021-09-16
- Discussions split across hundreds of slowly loading pages, with bad quoting and signatures2021-09-16
- Must type markup tags to bold text instead of a WYSIWYG toggle2021-09-16
- Forum interfaces are hard to use, while modern alternatives have no instructions2021-09-16
- Forum interface is awful UX, worse than HN or subreddit layouts2021-09-16
- Forum user experience is terrible, with clunky interfaces that are hard to use.2021-04-29
- Useful information buried in 65-page threads on a dated interface2020-08-06
- Too many or too few boards make conversations hard to keep track of2018-10-29
- Interface became almost unusable after acquisition, with ads in every corner2018-08-28
- Login pop-up appears on every navigation, blocking reading public threads2018-07-08
- Forum text is cut off on mobile, with content too wide to scroll into view2018-03-08
- Pages stay in loading state for 10+ seconds when some avatar hosts don't respond on port 4432016-11-04
- Many forums have interfaces that are absolutely unusable2016-09-14
- Forums show few posts per page, forcing many clicks through page numbers to browse2013-09-06
- Hard to tell which replies answer which comment without nested threads2013-04-12
- Hard to resume reading a threaded discussion where you left off2013-02-07
- Classifieds, events and reviews are forced into threads, so users can't find, compare or map them2012-11-16
- Adding lists requires multiple clicks in the clunky WYSIWYG editor2012-10-26
- Scrollbar of thread list is hidden until hovering directly over it, which is awkward2012-09-10