I’m just going through www.vbulletin.org reading through mods and template edits for the Soul Food Cafe forum, just to see if there’s anything useful to make my life easier.
There are some absolutely ridiculous mods there, to the point where I wonder why the author bothered to post it in the first place.
One mod replaces the post editor, which usually looks like this:
See that, nice and simple, completely not confusing for your members.
The mod turns it into this MySpace wannabe monstrosity:
It’s absolutely ghastly!
And what’s the deal with all these authors not bothering to include a screenshot? Is it seriously that difficult to press “Print Screen” and attach a JPEG to your post?
I’m sick of having to click “DEMO” and go to some hideous and painfully slow forum just to see what the mod does. It’s not like the description ever explains it, it’s usually in some terrible cross between English and who knows what language. And the mod titles are usually just as confusing.
One mod was called “Advanced Menu”. You’d think logically that it would give you some kind of more complex or more detailed menu option. What does it actually do? It disables right-clicking and selecting text, two of the most annoying and arrogant things a webmaster can do to their members.
Another mod adds pictures next to member usernames on the forum. Do you really want your members to have that kind of power over how your forum looks? Don’t give your members that ability, MySpace gave the general public the power to control a webpage and look what they all came up with!
There’s a reason why I would rather close my site down than give my members access to the MARQUEE and BLINK tags. Hell, I even made “posting in an unreadable text color” against the rules of my forum, I’ve even had to hand out the occasional infraction (my other members were very appreciative)!
Of course, you can’t tell an author how stupid, annoying and pointless their work is, and how they’re actually damaging the whole internet. They’ll just assume you’re personally attacking them and try to get your post removed.
So instead you have to vent on your blog.
Look at this mod description:
Basically this creats a button with whatever message you put into it, and when a user clicks it a popup alert comes up with a message they placed.
Yeah that makes perfect sense, and I totally didn’t need to read it 5 times to work out what the hell you were trying to say. And yes, those screenshots were completely unnecessary.
