|Forum|Articles|Websites that suck By Anubis   I have been downloading and investigating a number of maps and mods for Unreal Tournament in recent weeks. In my search the thing that has jumped out at me the most is not the coolness of the the mods being made in the UT sector or all the great maps available. No the thing that jumps out at me is how across the board UT sites suck so badly. I an not talking about minor UI problems like tacky animated gifs or graphics the size of Greenland. A large percentage of the UT sites I have been to in the preceding weeks were so horrendously corrupted that they were completely unusable and the only way to read or navigate them was to read the source code. I consider it a horrible failure of a website designer when the source code for their site is much easier to navigate than the site itself. Image Maps I hate image maps as a rule. You have to wait for the whole damm image to load before you can move on and they fail far more often than they should. Nothing sucks more than an image map that loads halfway and the link you wanted was on the part that did not load. You find these damm things on every site but the UT sites stand out because of the way UT people love to use these huge image maps that fill the screen and take 2 minutes to load and on top of that don't work, requiring a trip to the source code to navigate the site. Splash Screen Intro's In recent memory a lot of gaming sites, UT sites included have started using these damm splash screen entry pages. When linking to the sites main page, instead of being greeted with content you see a huge full screen graphic of the sites logo or some other bullshit and nothing else. They make the image an image link so you are forced to wait for the entire image to load before you can get to actual content. Heaven help you if the image map stops loading halfway through. Utron(http://www.planetunreal.com/utron/) and Urban Distortion(http://www.planetunreal.com/urbandistortion/) are good examples Flash / Shockwave garbage. I have nothing against flash animations for content. If some guy makes a shockwave plugin of Ned Flanders beating the crap out of fluffy bunnies with a hockey stick and puts a page of it up on his site that is fine by me. What I hate is when people use flash for site navigation. I have been to too may sties that used flash for their sidebars, for crying out loud. Their sites were 100% unusable because you can not get the links out of a flash animation with a source code dump. Frames I hate frames. I really really hate frames. It is possible to make a frame site work but no one knows how to do it. Instead you get these stupid sites like Nalicity (http://www.planetunreal.com/nalicity/) that subdivide the screen into some horrendous frame nightmare. Generally these damm frame sites fill up 3/4 of the screen with logos and laggy eye candy and the actual content is confined to some minuscule square in the center of the screen. Nalicity is no different, it is the largest UT map archive in the realm of UT yet its most valuable content, its hosted maps lists, are confined to a tiny three inch long square on the right side of the screen. Javascript There is no worse thing for a user to see at a website than the message "loading javascript" at the bottom of their browsers screen. For the user this means anything from having to wait three minutes for 800k of clout to download so a giant 3D spinning "u" can be drawn to the screen, to a system crash that takes down the entire machine. I am sure there are plenty of good uses for javascript that would justify the system locks and 3 minute load times. I just don't think popup dialog boxes with "UT Rocks" or looping MIDI files of the Backstreet Boys playing in the background fall in that category. Massive Table Corruption This one truly baffles me. In the Myth world, everyone from clan sites like Wraith Squadron to map sites like COM can format a table background correctly. Even the Polycon site handles table formatting correctly. That is why it is so strange that the UT sector has such widespread table corruption in there sites. I am not talking about some minor misalignment problems here. I have seen table corruption so massive that the sites must be navigated through source code.I could not make tables this bad if I tried. Here is a good example (http://www.planetunreal.com/shrine/) Ram 2000- The buggiest site I have ever seen Ram 2000 is a popular skin and player model site with a large selection of content available. It has to be one of the worst sites I have ever used. The UI changes from page to page, skin making tools are located in the side of a frame nightmare (http://www.planetunreal.com/ram2000/skins/Umods/index.htm) whereas their skin menu is located in a horizontal image map (http://www.planetunreal.com/ram2000/skins/Skins/index.htm). The image maps for their models menu (http://www.planetunreal.com/ram2000/skins/Models/menu.htm) is so long that some selections disappear off of the side of the screen and no scroll bars are rendered. There are not resolution detection scripts so the four people with 22 inch Cinema Displays can navigate the site as intended but the rest of us have to do a source code dump. Text content is confined to a frame in a frame nightmare and disappears off the side of the screen, a source code dump is needed to read it. Navigation of content categories is provided by a corpulent image map (http://www.planetunreal.com/ram2000/skins/index.htm) that fills up most of the screen, if you allow the image map to load completely so you can make a selection buggy javascript will either send you to a random and unrelated website or hard crash the computer. The only way to navigate their main menu is to quickly stop the browser from loading the page before the javascript can be activated and then do a source code dump.And look at this links page (http://www.planetunreal.com/ram2000/skins/otherhtml/Coollinks.htm). It literally takes 10 minutes to load. Overall at least 70 percent of the site should be or has to be navigated by means of the source code and I consider this a horrible failure of website design. The makers of this site should have fully loaded eightball launchers shoved up their asses.       Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|