It's Official - The Forums suck

Just when you thought the forum saga was over, along comes a spider, well that's unfair to spiders, the forums suck, it's official. I thought part of the reason for wanting to rid the place of the old forums was because it was a tad embarrassing to have your customers criticising you, there's no need to even read the posts to see this abomination in action, it's bad, if you don't believe me click here.

I did intend to post a piece about social engineering, Lindens trying to achieve the impossible and not recognising human nature, give examples of people moaning on the Adobe and ebay forums and have a rant about there not being a classified section. I was going to post about how the Linden behaviour in the forum dispute has been hostile, how they've not been interested in meeting residents half way, I came home from work fully intending to do this but thought I'd pop into the forums first and take a shufty.....two minutes in and I'm overwhelmed by how bad it is! I mean seriously, is this some sort of joke? Are they taking revenge on us for complaining about closing the old forums down, they'll be inaccessible for around a month, which is another shocker, you can't even get hold of the recently posted good info.

What the hell is going on here? I'm not in the "I hate the software" camp, but bloody hell, I'm hating this layout. I've used this software elsewhere, I've used it on the commerce forums on the same site and it's nowhere near as difficult to navigate as this and the reason seems to be clear, there are only a couple of sections on the commerce forums, no wonder they wanted to consolidate the existing forum and have less top level categories, it's a complete mess with more than a few categories and then there's the incosistency with clicking on general discussion and getting one list of discussions and then clicking on the discussions link and getting a different ordering and different topics appearing.

I mean really, it can't be that hard to setup sensible navigation, it really can't be that hard! I know it's not that hard, look at the adobe forums, which use the same software, look at the Cnet forums, which use the same software. Whereas VBulletin still looks better than either of those, at least they have presentable forums.

To be fair once you get to a discussions list, it's not so bad, once you get there, then you have to hope the post hasn't been moved to another section by a moderator because when that happens you click the discssuins link to get back to that list and find yourself somewhere else, but that's not new, that has been happening with the commerce forums when posts get moved too.

However I will say one thing, it's still completely out of order that in all that mess there's no classified section and as can be seen from the services section of the commerce forum, people are starting to use that as the default classified section because LL won't provide one. This is what happens, this is always what happens, just swallow some pride and put a classified section in there. Then get someone to provide a half decent layout, come on, these are the official forums, they shouldn't look this bad!