“Anonymous” is a name that can be used by anyone on the internet. When “Anonymous” does something, what that actually means is that one or more people using the name did that thing on behalf of everyone who identifies as “Anonymous”.

A statement like “Anonymous will hack Sony” is not a warning to Sony. It’s a request made to other people identifying with the name. So, “Anonymous will hack you” really means “hey, somebody should hack these guys, does anybody feel like doing it?”. Likewise, “Anonymous will boycott Sony for reasons xyz” is effectively saying “let’s boycott Sony, here’s why they deserve it”. The fact that the media scrambles to publicize anything anybody says under the name Anonymous plays directly into their hands.

If enough capable people feel like doing it, then it gets done. If not, it doesn’t. So no, Anonymous does not make promises, nor does it go back on them. Statements like “Anonymous never does anything” demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works. If you’re mocking Anonymous for “attacking the wrong people” then you are way off-base. That video was released by a single person. If people don’t feel that Justin Bieber deserves to be attacked, then he won’t be. If they do, then to be honest, he probably does.

The point of hacking something like the PlayStation network is to make these complex issues directly relevant to the everyday lives of a large demographic. A convenient side effect of hurting the users’ experience is that it can cost Sony financially, but that was never the primary goal. The goal is to draw attention to the unethical behaviour of this company, for its support of SOPA, its obsession with drowning all of its products in DRMs, or anything else that could be considered harmful.

Sony is already on the lengthy list of corporations that I’m not going to fund. In that sense, I myself am participating in a Sony boycott (though as a pretentious indie).

And could somebody tell me who the fuck Kim Kardashian is?

Microsoft has been steadily changing the format of their Office documents with every release of Microsoft Office. They have also not released the details of these formats, which means the only program that can reliably read the file you sent is the same version of Microsoft Office that you wrote it with (or newer). People with older versions of Microsoft Office, or people who don’t own any version, cannot reliably read these files.

This means we cannot exchange information until one of two things happens:

1. the information is sent to me in a standard format that I can read with a program of my choice.

2. I purchase and install the newest version of Microsoft Office (and anything else I need to run it).

I will not be doing the latter. A good standard format to use is the PDF, and I humbly request that you not send Microsoft Office attachments to anybody in the future. Some people may feel that not owning the latest version of Microsoft Office is somehow their fault.

(For more information, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)

If you’re still using Microsoft Office, do yourself a favour and install LibreOffice.

That’s why I made this satirical newspaper last year.

Click the images to enlarge.

I’m an eighteen-year-old university student majoring in Communication, Media, and Film; I’m also a programmer and a web designer who spends a lot of time on my computer. I know exactly where Vishal Singh in this article is coming from. I frequently get distracted from my schoolwork to edit videos, check Facebook, and post on this blog. I’m fully aware that I can sometimes allow my hobbies with technology to get in the way of my school work, and I have that oft-levied student issue of staying up too late. The New York Times brings up some good points, but comes to the wrong conclusion.

Who is to blame for the academic disinterest of students? The students are.

Of course, most people would point out that students are (primarily) young people who should be guided by the education system, not punished. And that all sounds great on paper when you’re trying to appease people’s parents for political reasons, but I know first-hand that this is not a stance that holds any water in reality. This sort of nonsense is exemplified perfectly by Marcia Blondel’s experience with her classroom, as related in the article:

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

I did high school and I remember teachers like this. They’re incompetent. Novel idea for Ms. Blondel: if your students won’t work, FAIL THEM. If that seems like something that’s going to get you fired, you’re probably an awful teacher. Students need someone engaging to make them interested in the subject matter. Assigned to a mandatory subject that requires you to teach unwilling students? Get out the red marker.

As someone who knows how to read, my worst enemies in high school were the teachers that read to me, or got other students to read to me. It’s condescending and it slows down the entire class; stop doing it. I understand that you’re doing it to get everyone on the same playing field, but it’s not working. People need to help themselves.

The fact that parent groups force teachers to be “nice” to their students — which results in junk like this — is a very depressing one. We’re talking about high school, here, not kindergarten. I’m fully aware that most work in high school is busywork — the kind of pointless drudgery that exists solely to make schools look good to the government — but this is also true in the real world.

If you want a job, you’re going to have to put up with the pointless drudgery. Learn how to deal with it: that’s what schools should be teaching. This “regression of American education” is the system’s fault, not technology’s. It’s the consequence of politics.

I actually agree with a lot of points brought up in Richtel’s article. That computers and cell phones have an effect on students’ attention spans is a theory supported by scientific data, as the article rightly states. But the conclusion drawn from this theory — the implication that young people are innocent of sabotaging their own intellectual development, and that the nature of distraction itself is to blame — is obviously fallacious. Distraction has existed for all of human history, and just because it’s (arguably) easier to access nowadays does not make it something you can scapegoat. It’s a force of nature, not some malevolent entity that can be challenged.

If you’re going to report on how technology has changed our lives, do it factually. Don’t try to blame it for all our problems. Telling us that our relentless procrastination isn’t our fault is just enabling us; you’re giving us an excuse for our own stupidity.

As HAL 9000 would say, “This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.”

First off, let’s fast forward to the privacy models these websites use. Twitter is the most open of these networks. Facebook is essentially a walled garden because most people have privacy settings or have their profile completely blocked from non-friends. Non-friends, by the way, is slang for people who have not given into the smash hit service that wants to protect you from other people. Myspace is basically a site that intends to be a walled garden but nobody can figure out that fucking control panel.

Now let’s contrast this to what was going on during the 90s. AOL was trying to BE the internet by tricking n00bs into believe their interface was the “internet.” It was “online” in America. You have patriotism, tech bubble jargon, and those free coasters that everybody loves contributing to AOL’s success. For all your grandmother knew she was seeing The Matrix.

And that wraps up this ramble. I’ll try to post a little more often if I ever manage to free myself from Minecraft.

I join all the social networks, but I do so gradually, with the knowledge that I’m never going to get what I expect out of the experience. I approach new websites with a childlike fear of the unknown, but also a small bit of childlike glee: maybe this will be the one! Maybe I’ll finally find the social network that delivers what it promises!

Thus did I join Twitter. But to truly understand my experience with Twitter, you need to understand how I got to this situation.

My first social network was MySpace, back when it was known for something other than camwhores. I didn’t come in expecting anything unusual. “MySpace”, I figured, had to be something about creating “my space”. That sounded reasonable. But when it came to discovering other people’s spaces, I started to get a little afraid. It seemed to me like 99% of MySpace didn’t want me to intrude on their space, so they chose crazy background images and bad music to scare me away. Quite rude, if I do say so myself.

So bad neighbours were the key reason that I couldn’t stand MySpace. But building my own “space” was okay in its own right, and it seemed like the basic concept of a social network could still be salvaged. Maybe if a website could come along and offer something truly unique; something other than a half-assed Geocities/LiveJournal hybrid. I dreamed on.

Eventually, Facebook started to get popular, and I heard a rumour that it was the next MySpace. Presumably this meant that it would be an improvement! I was excited to try it out and see for myself what changes had been made, but I was still wary. I didn’t want a social network to hurt me the way MySpace had hurt me. It was just too much to bear.

With fear quickening my steps, I attempted to register for Facebook. And failed to register, because the sign-up page was so damned intimidating. It seemed to want to know everything about me: hardly anymore than I had revealed on MySpace, but still a lot for a budding new network to demand. I was frightened, but I eventually lied about virtually every detail of myself. Bingo!

Being undercover on Facebook was boring. No one would talk to me, and no one had anything interesting to say. What little I did see was all the same generic information template and ugly, outdated layout (though admittedly pretty modern by MySpace’s standards). With a heavy heart, I admitted that, although Facebook may be more competently maintained than its predecessor, it still just wasn’t what I was looking for in a social network.

It took me over a year to get over the loss. I’d been wronged twice in one lifetime — dreams slashed by the heartless masses maintaining the giant, monolithic enterprises of MySpace and Facebook. I just couldn’t take another hit.

Then I heard about Twitter. But it wasn’t the next Facebook, no… I heard that it could be a supplement to Facebook, that it was too different to even be considered on the same playing field. Maybe a unique social network is what I needed all along, I thought.

I was determined not to let this Twitter thing catch me off-guard like its predecessors had done, so I did a little deep thought this time. What could I expect from a “different” social networking experience? I suppose it would be something hard to guess, since it wouldn’t be very different otherwise. I decided that the secret must be in that cryptic name — “Twitter”? What was up with that? “Twitter” is something my heart does after I get my first kiss, not the name of a website!

So I tried thinking outside the box. What else could “twitter” mean?

I thought, “twit” can mean “idiot”, so maybe it’s a website for idiots? British idiots, based on the vocabulary involved. But that seemed too obvious, so I tried to think of other things that “twit” could be. I eventually came to the conclusion that “twit” could be a different onomatopoeia for “tweet”, like the twittering of birds.

So was Twitter a website for birds? It seemed reasonable at first — birds are rather important, after all. Turkeys are birds; without turkeys we’d have to skip Thanksgiving every year, which would eventually make the months go out of sync with the seasons. But something about that just seemed wrong. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a bird use a computer, and there would need to be a reasonable number of them doing so to necessitate the existence of a social network such as Twitter.

That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t a site for birds, it was a site for birds, with a wink wink and a nudge nudge. “Birds” from the 1930s who are still kickin’ around and need to get in contact with all their birdy friends. Who knows what they might talk about? Now I was on to something!

And could it be that the name “Twitter” contained a double meaning of sorts? I reasoned that, if the marketing genius behind a name that crafty could have one obscure meaning, surely they could have two. “Twit” is barely one key off “tit”, and tits would certainly reach a wider demographic than old women in their 80s, right? But selling to both markets would be even smarter!

I decided that there was only one logical meaning behind Twitter’s name: that Twitter was a social networking website for 80-year-old women to show off their tits. Made sense to me, and seemed more original than Facebook and MySpace had been. I knew that Twitter had to be something special to make people praise it so much.

Swelling with pride, I registered for Twitter. Half an hour later, I realized that it was yet another site for people to whine about their boring-ass lives, and most definitely NOT a place to discuss granny tits.

What a gyp.

Scrobbling seems to have an interesting effect on most people (or at least some people). People on Last.fm will often leave music playing all day, while not listening to it, just to get higher play counts on their profile. Having high play counts has no practical purpose, of course, but people do this anyway. How do I know? I could point out that my best friend Ryan does it, and I would be right, but the honest part of me points out that I do it, too. Sometimes. I try to refrain, but sometimes I slip and leave music playing for hours just for the sake of it. It’s an egotistical competition, yes, but it’s kind of fun. Besides, there’s no real harm in it, right? The numbers really are meaningless, after all, and the competitiveness that so many people create actually has its positive effects: namely, the fact that it makes people listen to more music. I listen to music sometimes just because I want more plays on my profile, but I also enjoy music that I would normally forget about. That’s kind of admirable, I guess, in a dumb sort of way.

One serious negative quality about scrobbling, however, is the fact it is is completely dependent on the ID3 tags. These tags are filled in by the users, which inevitably leads to mistaggings that clutter up the entire website. For the more OCD amongst us, this can be infuriating, and take the joy out of music. I asked my friend Matt Rebeiro for an exploitable quotation related to this phenomenon, and this is what I got:

“I usually avoid listening to things that are tagged wrongly [and I] listen to video game soundtracks less because I’m always unsure how to tag those.”
–Matt Rebeiro, obsessive nerd

It’s not the catchiest quote in the world, but it gets my point across. I’ve ignored albums before because I didn’t feel like filling out the tags. Granted, this is a problem that doesn’t apply to most people (because most people listen to music that’s actually in music databases, so they don’t have to tag everything manually). It applies to me, though, and it’s a very annoying side effect of the Last.fm experience.

I’ve also used my Last.fm profile as a reason to stop myself from listening to music even when I really wanted to. If you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll see that my top artist by a huge margin is Lemon Demon, which is probably one of my favourite bands. Yet the stats on Last.fm are somewhat misleading; Lemon Demon was basically the only band I listened to back when I first joined, and then my music taste evolved on a generic MP3 player that wasn’t able to scrobble. I only got an iPod (with scrobbling capability) recently, so you can only see the beginnings of other top artists now. Since getting an iPod, I’ve barely listened to a single Lemon Demon song because I want to give the other artists a chance to catch up.

It’s very annoying, because I’m genuinely embarrassed at the huge gap between my top artist and all the others — it makes me look silly, like I only listen to one band ever. Still, I want to listen to Lemon Demon every once in a while. The competitive quality I’ve assigned to Last.fm is having a negative effect on my ability to enjoy one of my favourite bands, which is slightly annoying. It’s all my fault, really, since there really shouldn’t be a competition here at all, but it’s an inevitable side effect of the website. I have an exchange from Twitter to prove it:

mattgcn: Manually scrobbling two weeks of listening? Don’t mind if I do!
RyanLalonde: What do you mean by manually scrobbling?
mattgcn: http://lastfmstats.livefrombmore.com/universalscrobbler/
RyanLalonde: Oh wow, you can really cheat from this. I won’t do it tho.
mattgcn: Yeah, I only use it honestly but looking at the numbers it seems some people abuse it

That was an exchange between two people I follow, Matt Rebeiro (from above) and Ryan Lalonde. It demonstrates three ways that scrobbling’s competitiveness manifests:

1. Matt wants to manually scrobble two weeks of music, something which he later described as “tedious“.
2. Scrobbling music that you didn’t listen to is considered cheating. You can’t cheat if there’s no competition.
3. Some people do abuse the manual scrobbling system to “cheat”, combining points 1 and 2.

This is all just my long-winded way of saying: Last.fm can easily turn into a competition. It’s actually pretty predictable if you think about it. Isn’t a large portion of the music industry funded by people’s egos? Many groups are defined completely by musical tastes, and some musical tastes are completely defined by groups — when was the last time you saw a nuclear physicist listening to gangsta rap? I didn’t even like the Beatles the first time I heard them, but I forced myself to give them a chance because a lot of people I respect like them, and a lot of bands I already liked listed them as an influence. I like the Beatles now, but that only proves the point. Last.fm’s “compatibility meter” only furthers attitudes like this.

Last.fm is a lot of fun, but it might have some unexpected consequences. I do recommend that you join the site if you haven’t already, but I won’t hold it against you if you choose not to. Not everyone likes to be part of the high-horse circlejerk that Last.fm can easily become.

10) There are no NPCs.
Most games bog you down with stupid AI and immersion-breaking invincible townspeople. Urban Dead has none of that. Every single being in Malton has a player behind it, whether it be person, zombie, or corpse. This honestly isn’t much of an advantage over other browser games, but it’s certainly unique, or at least uncommon. Even games with no computer-controlled enemies will at least have a shop or something. Urban Dead has no NPCs whatsoever, and that’s pretty badass.

9) The game is highly customizable without much effort.
The term “without much effort” may need to be clarified: Urban Dead is highly customizable if you use Firefox. (I can already hear the Opera users groaning.) If you have Firefox, you can make the bland-looking default game look a hundred times better simply by installing the UD Toolbar, though the actual toolbar portion of it should be disabled immediately because it’s hideous. After the toolbar, however, this extension adds graphics to the game and makes the layout slightly better, which makes it much easier to keep track of what you’re doing. If that doesn’t satisfy you, there are dozens of Greasemonkey scripts that will make loads of small UI tweaks. The game is perfectly playable without any alteration, but it’s simple enough that it gives you the ability to easily modify it to suit your style, something that most games lack.

8) It’s about zombies.
Shallow maybe, but zombies are awesome! There’s no better fuel for one’s love of drama, plus one’s love of violence, plus one’s repressed misanthropy, than a horde of humanoid murderers trying to smash down the hastily-constructed barricades of every tormented soul that isn’t Rambo. For the people that are Rambo, they’ve already joined the horde as death cultists. There’s two things that I will always have a soft spot for: misanthropic cyberpunk protagonists, and unrelenting waves of zombies. Since there’s a depressing lack of the former, I’m going to have to say that Urban Dead is unbeatable in this category.

7) There’s no economy.
…And that means that there’s no broken economy either. Unlike most online games that suffer constant inflation and enough financial issues to make the real-world economy look stable in comparison, Urban Dead has no means of trading or buying items. There’s no money, either. All items are found by looting the abandoned buildings strewn across Malton. Different buildings give different items (e.g., hospitals give first-aid kits, junkyards give junk), which turns the game into a sort of resource war over those buildings that are most important to human survival. You need to fight to secure a hospital so that you can spend time searching it for first-aid kits, then move onto the nearest police station to load up on shotgun shells, then make shelter in a shack somewhere that won’t draw attention. Everything is balanced.

6) The developer is awesome.
This is an underrated quality. A lot of games wallow in their problems because the developers are recluses that never come out in public to hear what people want. Kevan actually pays attention to the game and updates it accordingly. He also actually listens to his players and sometimes incorporates suggestions that they vote up on the wiki. Which brings me to my next point…

5) They have a well-maintained wiki.
The Urban Dead Wiki is like a strategy guide, and it’s complete enough to help you get a feeling for the game without much hassle. It doesn’t get bogged down in useless details — it gets right to the point and explains the things you want explained. Once you’ve learned how the game works, you’ll still use the wiki every once in a while to check what the objectives of a group you meet are — you wouldn’t want to let a human into your hideout if he’s a member of a zombie group, after all. This wiki works in much the same way as the KoL Wiki does for Kingdom of Loathing, but with a much better URL.

4) There are practically no rules.
Yet the game isn’t broken. The only real rule is against multiple accounts, which would upset the fairness of the game. Outside of that, there isn’t much. Humans kill humans all the time and it doesn’t upset the game because it all makes sense: those humans are the death cultists, or the psychopaths from Dead Rising. Zombies kill zombies and it makes sense because the zombies in Malton are smarter than typical zombies. If they can form groups and attack certain buildings consciously, who’s to say that they can’t form an allegiance with humans? They’re called life cultists, the antithesis to the typical death cultists. You don’t see them in zombie movies, but they still work fine. Urban Dead is practically self-governing because anyone who’s being a dick can be killed by a horde of people that aren’t dicks.

3) You can play all day, kind of.
This is a huge thing in browser games. Almost all of them limit how much you can play in a day by assigning you some kind of “energy” that only refills at night. Urban Dead changes it up by giving you an energy that refills slowly over the course of the day. That might not sound like much, but it means that you can essentially play the game all day… as long as you play slowly. Some people might not care, but I think this feature is an important part of what makes Urban Dead so fun: you don’t fall into a routine with it. You really can play it anytime.

2) It has a good community.
This one is obviously important. A great game with a bad community just wouldn’t be worth it. Luckily Urban Dead has a great community, mostly thanks to the aforementioned lack of rules. People can’t really troll you, since getting killed is a normal part of the game and makes sense from all sides. The only people who ruin the game are the ones who cheat and use multiple accounts, but they don’t usually get in the way of your fun. Another great thing about the community is that…

1) People actually roleplay.
Urban Dead is the only online game I’ve ever played in which the players roleplay more often than not. Seriously, half the fun of the game is from organising into groups of fellow players to take out whatever group you disagree with. And if you get bored, switch sides and play as the opposite class for a while. It’s all okay. The way people communicate in-game will almost always heighten the experience rather than detract like in most games. People send messages by talking, graffiti, and radio broadcasting — all of these create an atmosphere that suits the game perfectly. Nothing is more immersive than sitting in a hospital with a bunch of survivors, huddling around your radio transmitter, to hear a broadcast from across town that another building held by your group has been taken down. You hear people calling for backup as zombies lay siege to their resources, and people from your building run to help them out. If things go sour, you get to hear the other building’s radio transmitter crash to the ground before the signal cuts off. You know that the people who left to help aren’t coming back for a while.

Immersion can make or break a game. Urban Dead actually has one major flaw that would ruin all of its positives: there are only 43 skills in the game to buy, and you won’t care about most of them. Once you buy those skills, your initial goal to “level up your character” is gone. In a normal online game, the loss of that goal would destroy your only incentive to play the game, causing you to give up — that’s why characters in World of Warcraft take ages to build. Urban Dead embraces this flaw and turns it to its advantage with its incredible immersion: by the time you buy the skills, you’re playing the game for the community and the roleplaying. I’ve never seen an online game built like that, and that’s the key reason I think Urban Dead is the best online game ever. There’s no grinding!

IE8 follows in the proud Internet Explorer tradition of being confused. It tries really hard to emulate the great features that Firefox and Opera have had for years now, but it also continues to support the computer-illiterate Windows users that make up the majority of its user base. That’s admirable in a sense — Microsoft can’t be expected to alienate their customers, after all — but it holds Internet Explorer back from being the great browser it really could be. With IE8, I really feel like the browser could be great with a few adjustments — something a robust community could fix, a la Firefox’s extensions. Internet Explorer 8 does have a built-in extension system, but it’s hidden deep in “Internet Options”, so no one ever notices it’s there.

What extensions there are for IE8 are not even really “extensions” in the Firefox sense. Most of them are the same common plugins that we’ve had for the last decade, such as a Flash player and Java. The only extension worth anything is IE7Pro, though it doesn’t have full support for IE8 yet. When it’s completely up-to-date, however, it will be a must have — though it shouldn’t be, since it’s features should all be there by default. (Though I’ll concede that Firefox doesn’t have some of IE7Pro’s features by default either, extensions for it have been available and well-maintained for a very long time. Opera has all the features.)

It seems like Internet Explorer 8 tries to go the Opera route — that is, they try to not depend on the extensions, since they know there’s no community to keep the extensions alive. Opera accomplishes this quite well, but IE8 falls short of the mark for two seemingly paradoxical reasons:
1) many of the new features are implemented very poorly and get in the way
2) many of the new features are implemented so well that you think they don’t exist
Clearly the extensions system falls into the latter category, since hardly anyone seems to realise it exists. The first category manifests itself a lot by cluttering IE’s horrendous default theme. As an example, let’s compare IE8′s default context menu (left) to Firefox 3′s (right).

Notice how the IE8 menu is almost twice as huge, but offers no more features than Firefox’s menu. That’s a serious design flaw. The tab bar has a similar problem — almost half of it is covered by buttons that serve very little purpose, right underneath a “favorites” bar that is practically empty. Is there any reason that we couldn’t use that enormous favorites bar to place some of the unnecessary buttons? I think the tab bar needs the space far more than the favorites bar.

Amongst IE8′s new features is InPrivate, which is just like Chrome’s Incognito mode. A solid addition, though I have no real use for it. Just like Chrome, IE8 offers no means of opening an InPrivate session in a new tab rather than a new window. (I guess we’ll have to wait until Firefox and Opera do that before Microsoft will add it to Internet Explorer.) Another new feature that’s actually unique to IE is the homepage system. IE8 allows you to set multiple homepages and have them all open in tabs, just like every other big browser nowadays. Microsoft decided to make it more user friendly by adding a little menu to the home button, complete with “add new homepage” buttons and everything. I have to compliment the development team for that one — it’s a brilliant way to incorporate a good feature without sacrificing the computer-illiterate users who would otherwise be confused.

I guess this post is more a list of random complaints than it is a proper review, but oh well. Internet Explorer 8 is another step in the right direction from Microsoft, but it’s still not a great browser. Stick to Firefox.

5. Splash screens
Why do these exist? I can’t think of a single website that actually benefits from having a splash screen. In case you don’t know, a splash screen is just a page saying “welcome to this site!” with an enter link that usually takes you to what should be the index. On some particularly obnoxious sites, the splash screen will be some huge Flash monstrosity that takes longer to load than the rest of the site. There is simply no reason to have a splash screen.

4. Unnecessary Flash and Javascript
This is a common mistake made by big websites. In their mission to make their website as elegant as possible, they break the cardinal rule of web design: make the site work quickly. Nothing really lags for me, but you’re probably not designing for people like me. You’re probably designing for the average person that doesn’t have an incredible computer with a lightning-fast internet connection. Filling your website with Flash and Javascript just to pretty it up will do nothing but slow the site down and cause many frustrated visitors.

3. Sound
There should never be sound on your website unless the visitor makes an overt decision to hear sound, or it’s in a place where it’s obviously expected (such as a game). My favourite combination here is when bad webdesigners combine #5 and #3 together — a splash screen with music! So now you can have the inconvenience of a) going through an extra page for no reason, b) having everyone within earshot hear that you’ve gone through an extra page for no reason, and c) downloading a song that you didn’t want to listen to in the first place. If this is your idea of a great website, please set fire to your computer.

2. In-line advertisements
I know you need money, but is it really necessary to have every other word on your website link to some advertisement? Luckily, it seems that only really atrocious websites do this, but it always baffled me. There’s no quicker way to ruin the enjoyment in your site then by making every link suspicious. You never know whether a link is going to be an ad or a real page — the easiest way to find out, by hovering your cursor over the link to check the target URL, will just make the ad appear if there is one. Your visitors end up never clicking anything because they’ll just assume that everything is an ad. Your content becomes a jumbled mess that no one will ever want to read.

1. Sprawling web communities
Oh, dear. Just to be clear, I’ll explain: by “sprawling web community”, I mean those websites that have a forum. And on that forum, you might find that 10% of the users actually know what website they’re on. Yeah, that kind of forum. These are ridiculously common, which is understandable. People run out of material to talk about, so they just start talking about other things, which leads to everyone getting to know each other, which leads to everyone hating newbies, which leads to some weird internet subculture. It’s cool if you’re a member of the forum, but it’s extremely annoying to be the one in charge of the forum. All you want is a forum for fans of your site, but it seems like half the people on your forum aren’t fans anymore, if they ever were to begin with.

This one is a bit harder to prevent, and isn’t really an aspect of web design at all. It’s more dependent on your website’s target audience. If your audience includes the kinds of people who would be likely to hang around forums all day… well, you’re pretty much screwed. You’re going to have to fight for your community to stop it from breaking away. Trust me: I can think of several websites off the top of my head that no longer have anything to do with what they were originally about. This was all caused by the forum growing and devouring all the real content, then becoming a giant orgy of self-reference (like every forum). I don’t want to name any sites specifically, in the interest of sparing people’s feelings.

Personally, I think forum sprawl is a serious threat to a lot of websites. And it’s one people will often ignore until it’s too late. It’s not strictly part of web design, but it’s still something very important to the website, and the kind of thing that the webmaster should keep in mind when they make their plans.

Anyway, now I’m done whining about stuff. It’s good to put something negative here every once in a while, since I’m usually pretty positive. Maybe next time I’ll make a post about my favourite web design patterns.