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phpBB
Raised as a usability problem by 28 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 23 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
New users find forum interface out of place and give upUnreviewed
20102026- Old forum format is hard to go back to after modern UX2023-06-16
- Setting up a new forum requires many hard steps: domain, hosting, install, auth, SEO2023-06-16
- New users find the forum interface out of place and give up2023-06-16
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 30 complaints
- Signatures take up most of the page, making posts hard to read2026-07-02
- Pages with 100 animated emoticons slow the browser to a halt2025-03-05
- Search requires logging in and long threads are hard to navigate, paging 10 badly laid out posts at a time2023-10-04
- Can't find anything and must wade through decoration to see content2023-07-25
- Forums where you can't find anything and must wade through decoration to see content2023-07-25
- Old forum format is hard to go back to after modern UX2023-06-16
- Setting up a new forum requires many hard steps: domain, hosting, install, auth, SEO2023-06-16
- New users find the forum interface out of place and give up2023-06-16
- Cluttered layout and pagination make it hard to navigate and find discussions2023-02-06
- Large threads become messy and non-hierarchical, hard to follow2022-11-25
- Users can't find forum communities without knowing the right search terms and Google2022-11-25
- Forum software never had usable UI for phones, making it hard to use2022-11-24
- Navigating between sub-forums gets painful and slow after the initial page load2022-10-10
- Forum software's interface is barely usable and looks poor2022-10-10
- Info buried in 100-page threads, paged one at a time, with avatars and signatures eating space2022-10-10
- Cluttered comment pages with excess metadata, signatures and paging through inane replies2022-08-27
- Replies to different posts are hard to follow across many pages, and answers get buried2022-07-21
- Forum pages took multiple seconds to load, making navigation slow2022-04-19
- Post signatures are bigger than the actual content, making posts hard to read2021-12-14
- Upgrading requires multiple sequential steps, and any failure can take the board down2021-11-18
- Forum interface has terrible UX that users tolerated only for lack of alternatives2021-09-16
- Forums are hard to use: outdated pagination, intrusive signatures, and confusing timestamps2016-02-10
- Search fails to find unicode terms like umlauts; finding content is hard2015-09-02
- Using a forum as a bug tracker makes requests easy to lose and never fixed2015-04-20
- Hard to follow replies and conversation threads on forums and mailing lists2014-04-18
- Writing formatting markup by hand is burdensome compared to a visual text editor2014-03-08
- Search requires registration, a complicated form and a captcha2012-03-28
- Threads spanning 140 or more pages are unusable to follow2011-06-07
- Information is impossible to find; forums split into many confusing areas2010-08-31
- Less tech-savvy users struggle with BBCode, image posting, and search2010-08-20