What do you hate the most about forum software?

In general, not any specific platform...

What do you hate the most about forum software or platforms in general?

Why do you dislike it so much?

Slow process to innovate or adopt new technology or get timely updates released that bring something to the end users that is now the "norm". When a script developer group (paid or open source) stagnates it impacts the end users of their product.

Tracy said:

Slow process to innovate or adopt new technology or get timely updates released that bring something to the end users that is now the "norm". When a script developer group (paid or open source) stagnates it impacts the end users of their product.

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Very slow.

Shawn Gossman said:

Very slow.

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There are some in the paid and quite a few in the open source fields that fit that descriptor.

Tracy said:

There are some in the paid and quite a few in the open source fields that fit that descriptor.

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I think both sides are barely hanging on. I just don't think many are on board anymore, developers that is. I think many have moved onto different things and the old forum platforms are a waste of their time.

Shawn Gossman said:

I think many have moved onto different things and the old forum platforms are a waste of their time.

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That's why I think, especially in the open source arena, Discourse and NodeBB have a higher chance of maintaining relevance since they are constantly updating it and trying to find different boundaries to work towards.
Discourse in several ways offers more than Xenforo, Invision, Woltlab or vBulletin for a LOT less financial costs if you are needing primarily a forum based solution.
But the downfall to it is... it is more modern and those "the old format is great" followers seem to have issues adjusting, and they are frequently the loudest.
Another downfall to them is they are not as simple to install as a PHP based script that most are used to and they currently do not play well on most shared hosting offerings.

It seems that some developers are still living in the past (again, both open source and paid offerings) and blinded to what the current internet user desires. It does not help when there are those cult members that live only to echo what their chosen developers believe.

Personally, I hate the poor search functionality of most forum's softwares. As a result how poor those search systems are, it makes finding relevant discussions very hard. It's worst when you're dealing with a big forum with active users.

Heatman said:

Personally, I hate the poor search functionality of most forum's softwares. As a result how poor those search systems are, it makes finding relevant discussions very hard. It's worst when you're dealing with a big forum with active users.

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This has been a LONG pet peeve of mine - but more based upon content discovery and how some scripts restrict some of its strongest feature(s) from use of it.
An example, custom fields in use by Xenforo. It's been asked for for years that they enable the discovery of custom fields... and for years it's been ignored.
Xenforo did make a large step forward for those that use MySQL for their search engine... but for those of us that paid extra for ES, it's still pretty much the same it was 5-7 years ago.

Tracy said:

This has been a LONG pet peeve of mine - but more based upon content discovery and how some scripts restrict some of its strongest feature(s) from use of it.
An example, custom fields in use by Xenforo. It's been asked for for years that they enable the discovery of custom fields... and for years it's been ignored.
Xenforo did make a large step forward for those that use MySQL for their search engine... but for those of us that paid extra for ES, it's still pretty much the same it was 5-7 years ago.

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Yeah.

The expensive search addon of XenForo IMO should be a default feature of XenForo. Search is a big part of a forum component. I can understand Resources and Media Gallery being addons, but the better search doesn't make any sense to me. That should be a default feature that XF uses as a way to say their software is better because thew search component of the community is strong.

Shawn Gossman said:

Yeah.

The expensive search addon of XenForo IMO should be a default feature of XenForo. Search is a big part of a forum component. I can understand Resources and Media Gallery being addons, but the better search doesn't make any sense to me. That should be a default feature that XF uses as a way to say their software is better because thew search component of the community is strong.

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Over the last several years the Xenforo developers have pretty much ignored any major advancements/improvements in XFMG, XFRM or XFES. Guess they have a hard enough time with just the core forum offering and their SaaS keeping them busy.
But they did, as I mentioned, make some improvements in the mySQL search, which is honestly what most use. The reason that XFES is not core is the underlying dependency on having access to an ElasticSearch server. You either have to host it on your own VPS/dedicated server or you have to engage in a 3rd party provider. That's not anything that they really have much control over so I do not fault them for not having it "built in".
Now, that is not saying that they could not have the core built in and have an ACP option on whether to use an ES server or mySQL similar to what Invision did with the Sphinx engine. But it robs them of an additional revenue source if they do that.