The 10 Biggest Web Annoyances

"I hate when I am on a forum and people just post random comments about how much somebody is a jerk or how their religion saves," said PC World reader Roberta Dikeman of Dublin, California. "Can we please stay on topic--or post that drivel on your own sites!"

Hiding behind the pseudonymity of a Web alias, trolls disrupt useful discussions with ludicrous rants, inane threadjackings, personal insults, and abusive language, deliberately baiting forum regulars into pointless controversy and disharmony.

Trolls lurk everywhere--in Google and Yahoo newsgroups, in blog comment areas, and on specialty message boards created to offer technical help to users.

The free and fruitful exchange of ideas on the Web suffers when Web community owners have to moderate discussions and keep a tight rein on membership. But such actions are among the few effective ways to maintain civiliA-ty and sanity in online forums. Another approach is for users to police the community themselves by collectively ignoring or dismissing malicious interlopers.

Sites like Ticketmaster have managed to transform one of the Internet's biggest conveniences--the ability to buy and print out event tickets in a few mouse clicks--into one of its biggest rip-offs. Never mind that automated ticketing companies have dispensed with much of the traditional overhead (staff, rent, equipment) associated with selling tickets at a physical location. Never mind that they don't have to print the tickets you buy or ship them to your home.

Ticketmaster.com, the world's largest ticketing agent, adds a $9 "convenience charge" to the price of every $32.50 ticket for a concert in San Francisco, for example, plus a $4.90 "processing fee" on top of every order. So if you buy one ticket, you pay 42 percent of the face value of the ticket in fees to Ticketmaster! In contrast, assuming that the show isn't sold out, you can buy the same ticket at the Civic Auditorium box office sans convenience fees for $32.50--a savings of nearly $14.

One reason that Ticketmaster can impose such prices is that it faces little competition in the events ticketing business; the company holds exclusive contracts with the majority of venues in the United States. In 1994, the rock band Pearl Jam famously complained to the U.S. Department of Justice that TicketMaster's high prices were made possible by a monopoly, but the DOJ ultimately decided that Ticketmaster hadn't broken any antitrust laws.

7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn't Help

Web 2.0 technology supports the delivery of useful applications in snazzy interactive Web interfaces, but if you need help wading through the site, the help section is often a dead end.

That's because the answers to many frequently asked questions presented there are too generic or obvious to be useful. For example, an application may not work properly because an essential browser plug-in is missing or because other software on the system is incompatible with the new app; but the FAQ and help pages on most sites don't address these problems specifically.