Ask HN: What annoys web developers?

This happened just yesterday.<p>Had to write a custom blog system for my day job (they don&#x27;t like wordpress or etc...) Blog has been in production for months now.<p>Yesterday, I get an email from the blog author:<p>&quot;I&#x27;d like to let you know that I&#x27;m noticing some issues with how the new Blog Comment System is working. I have been noticing these things the past couple months, and despite trying to work around them, I feel they are making it hard to get done what I need to do.&quot;<p>15 minutes after she sent the email, she called me (I was in a meeting), she then called another programmer who has nothing to do with the blog, who was in the same meeting, then sent a followup email to my boss making sure I got the email.<p>Hold on - you found a bug, you&#x27;ve known this was a bug for &quot;months&quot; now and your reporting it now? Further, months have passed until your now reporting the bug, but because I didn&#x27;t acknowledge the email because I was in a meeting, your now going down the phone list, panicked, apparently, looking for help?<p>The devil in me says don&#x27;t fix the bug for months also but I know that won&#x27;t fly.

When somebody who has nothing to do with programming tells you &quot;it seems like a small bug and can be fixed pretty quickly&quot;

Few things:<p>1. Can you just add another box to the right ?<p>2. Can you give me xyz similar to website A but mix it with ABC from website B ? sorry, I want a bit of both.<p>3. Can you change this text on the button ? (Hint: No I don&#x27;t want to. It requires a code change in my SAAS and could impact other clients)<p>4. My page loads too slow according to Google Page Speed.<p>5. Can I not require users to activate their email during initial sign up ? This scares potential sign-ups and we lose conversions. (Hint: No, otherwise you will get fake emails and cannot contact them anyway to up-sell)<p>6. My site is down. (Hint: You need to clear DNS cache as after moving your site to a new host, your computer is still trying to hit the old DNS settings).

When users don&#x27;t focus on describing a problem but instead are trying to offer a solution or even prescribe an implementation.

You should ask what annoys users.<p>Pop-ups&#x2F;lightboxes.<p>Changing the default scrolling behavior.<p>Sites crippled with ads.<p>Slow sites.<p>Google analytics everywhere.<p>Unreadable text (light gray on white, what could go wrong?)<p>Unzoomable sites. You know not all people can see perfectly well. I need to zoom to be able to read.<p>Sites working only on $X browser.<p>Headers sticking to the top, consuming screen space.<p>Lots, of other stuff...

Weird APIs. I have had to work with APIs that:<p>- Require all requests to be of the multipart variety.<p>- Only accept post requests.<p>- Only return 200 or 404 http codes.<p>- The request must be in urlencoded formatting but the response is in (invalid) json.<p>- Function names are mapped to URLs. Example:<p><pre><code> do_some_stuff() becomes &#x2F;do&#x2F;some&#x2F;stuff&#x2F;</code></pre>

A list of things that DONT annoy developers will probably be shorter.

Standards, modules and legacy technologies and frameworks (older than 6 months).

When recruiters blatantly miscapitalize technology names: Jquery or JQuery for instance.

The latest javascript framework your boss wants you to learn?..

Lack of a decent type system in JS.

This post annoys me. It&#x27;s not very productive.