Audience: Initrds!
Yes, good. You remembered. Y'know what else I hate? Web boards. Now, for someone who has never used an actual NNTP reader to read actual USENET newsgroups, with actual threading, then you have no idea how bad off you have it.
Threading, you ask? Yes, in NNTP, each message has a list of referrers, which lists the post's parents all the way up to the original post, and allows your newsreader to reconstruct a tree of posts and their replies. This allows posts to be read in the more logical order of parent/reply, instead of the easy but counter-intuitive ordering by date. This is my major gripe with webboards, but the list goes on... (I do love my lists.)
- Poor navigation - How many of you have wandered across a thread with over ten pages? How many of you have actually read everything in order to catch up with the thread? No? Of course not. Your average web board user is going to read the first page, maybe the last page, and think they understand what the conversation is about. Points will be repeated, stupid questions will be re-asked, and flamewars will result.
- Lack of state - When I come back to a webboard, even though I have a login and password, I have no way of telling where I was in any given thread. The list of threads gives me page numbers, but that will only get me close if I remember where I was last time. If I've got tens of threads to look through, I'm just not going to bother.
- Bloat - Things like this make me want to beat someone with a sack of doorknobs:
Compare for a moment the amount of actual content I have added to the conversation with the amount of additional redundant information about me. There is far too much extraneous information here. I don't need to see if they're online. I don't need to see when they joined, how many posts, their "level," links to their various contact methods, etc. I certainly don't need to see "Re: ...", since nobody ever changes the subject. I don't need to see if the IP was logged. That's a no-brainer. I dont' even really need to see an avatar, but it can be useful. I mean, look at how much space is being taken up by that left panel, and how much space it's wasting in the actual content of the post. And this information is in every post. I need a name, a date, and the post content. This is just wasteful.
- Registration - Ok, this one is less of a gripe, since sometimes registration is a good way to create a healthy, private community. But the fact of it is, for each one of these boards, I have a separate login and password. A distributed identity system like OpenID would help alleviate this by providing a single identity for all the scattered webboards out there.
Now, I don't really have the solutions for problems like threading or registration, but poor navigation, lack of state, and bloat are things that programmers can fix now, if they'd stop being lazy and start innovating. Google Groups is a good start, since most of its functionality is modeled after the USENET readers I mentioned at the beginning. Indeed, it integrates USENET archives with the creation of new, local, groups. Things like 2ch eliminate the registration problem by removing the requirement altogether. An even cooler solution would be to take the web out of it and make webboards a kind of threaded RSS feed. This way, you could use a web-based reader or a local client at your whim.
And in a bizarrely fitting twist, I just got this from fortune -a:
Almost anything derogatory you could say
about today's software design would be accurate.
-- K.E. Iverson