Thread: Survey: What annoys you on a blog?

Uh-oh. Let me get my freak on...

* autoplay music. NO. Being shouted at by people who were asleep moments ago does not make me feel wonderment at your web-fu.

* faint spidery gray text on SCREAMING WHITE BACKGROUND, where I feel like I'm being interrogated by Nazis in a Monty Python skit.

* colored text over busy images. Hello? I can't see you!

* pop-ups when your page first loads, that require me to press a button to make them go away. I don't care how important you or your webmaster thought your message was; your real message was "we are deliberately annoying you."

* no visible links, forcing me to run the cursor all over the page, looking to see if anything changes shape or color, or just randomly clicking to see if anything happens

* Google or Amazon ads, Taboola or Outbrain clickbait

* fonts that look like they came from a ransom note

* Flash. Please, for the love of [$INSERT_DIETY_HERE], no.

* pop-down, self-hiding, or roll-up submenus. Just freakin' try to navigate that on a tiny touchscreen. No.

* requiring the viewer to download some kind of plugin to make your site work. (besides Internet Explorer plugins, I include Flash and Java)

* using nonstandard HTML so your site works only with Internet Explorer. Or Explorer and Firefox. Extra points if your site only works with the *latest* version, which was just released last night.

* more extra points for snarky comments about whatever web browser your viewer is using, or for telling them to upgrade their version

* auto-loading content, where your site sits there running up the phone bill for viewers who are using metered cellular hotspots or PTT connections.

* hardcoding your site to 4096 pixels wide, forcing viewers to scroll left to right to see it

* hardcoding your site with huge margins, jamming your text into a 10- character-wide slot down the middle

* hardcoding your font sizes

* pop-ups, pop-unders, opening new browser windows for every sub-page

* anything that moves. Flapping flags, dancing kittens, it doesn't matter.

* requiring registration. (extra points for shopping sites that require registration before they'll let you see the price)

* again for shopping sites, not telling you how much they're charging for shipping until after they get my credit card number. (I assume; I won't give them the number unless I get a total first)

* yet again for shopping sites, credit card number fields that freak out if you put dashes in the number. Or freak out when you don't put dashes in the number. This is "Hello, World" level PHP programming, people. There's no excuse for that.

* there's also no excuse for a drop box for "Month" that stops at October. Yes, the default for most site builder packages is 10 entries. Making your customer scroll from October to December because you were too lazy to change "10" to 12" just makes you look foolish.

* filling out a long form, then having nothing visible happen when I click "send" or "continue." Put a not-very-noticeable error message somewhere that's not even on the visible screen. Make me scroll around to find it. Mark it only by some subtle change of color or font. Then arbitrarily dump half of what I typed in previously due to "security" and make me type it all in again. Iterate as desired. (See also: the old Infocom game "Bureaucracy."

* animated Javascript menus or graphics that bounce up and down on my screen when I try to page up or down

* grabbing my "back" button to turn your site into a Roach Motel

* setting the "back" button to simply jump to the top of the page instead of going back. (this may be some vBulletin plugin; I encounter it mostly on vBulletin forums)

There's probably more, but I think I just developed high blood pressure...