Products · Broad category
Online forums
Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 14 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Must log into many separate forums and page through to find thingsUnreviewed
20102026- Forum link leads to a search form, and the site is a jumble of topics, so the forum is hard to browse2025-05-06
- Hard to find content across many separate forums and platforms2023-06-09
- Must register an account just to view forum posts from search results2021-11-10
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 11 complaints
- Forums have mediocre mobile UX and require a separate account for each forum2026-02-24
- Forum link leads to a search form, and the site is a jumble of topics, so the forum is hard to browse2025-05-06
- Forced sign-up with many questions and posting limits deters them from joining2024-05-17
- Hard to find content across many separate forums and platforms2023-06-09
- Must register an account just to view forum posts from search results2021-11-10
- Post and reply boundaries are too faint to tell apart, and layout wastes screen space2021-09-16
- Ads push content off limited screen space and pages render poorly, skipping around2020-05-14
- Must log in to many separate forums and dig page by page to find things2019-04-30
- Hard to browse; long quotes, huge signatures, no voting, terrible search2019-04-05
- Forum editor times out too quickly, losing posts written in the browser2013-07-11
- Must confirm email, then wait for membership approval before posting2010-09-02