Is it spam email, slow connections, rude people in forums or not being able to find what you’re looking for?

Mine at the moment is forms.

I fill out a form online with my name address and other details.  Then my account number and any other information they require.  After taking all the time to fill in the form you press ‘send’ or ‘next’ only to be alerted to the fact that an error occurred and you need to try again.

On going back to the form it is, of course, blank.  You have to look up your numbers again and repeat the whole process which fails a second time.  Depending on how important the form is to fill in, you may try once more.

This kind of thing seems to happen more often lately on different computers, so I’m wondering if companies simply haven’t got the bandwidth to cope with demand.

This was the case with 02 recently, when I attempted to upgrade my iPhone to the new 3G model.

The form took several minutes to load onto my screen.  I dutifully completed all the details then pressed the ‘Send’ button only to find myself facing a blank page.  Has the order gone through?  Will my credit card be charged twice?

Who knows?  You can’t telephone them as it’s an online offer only.  Great.

That is my main Internet pet hate at the moment. 

Others include the infamous ‘Time Out’.  Time Out is when you are deemed not to be using the website forum or whatever for a few minutes, so you get signed out.  This is fine, it’s a good security thing I suppose, just in case you’re doing your business accounts from the computer in the local library and you forget to sign out, other people can view your details.  But in normal use, this feature is so annoying.

I go to find some details, get back to my terminal and nothing is active.  You need to go back to the sign-in page, sign in and then attempt to find the page you were on before the system ‘thought’ that you’d had enough.

One popular forum I regularly visit times out right in the middle of me writing a message to another forum member.  Anything longer than a few minutes typing and, Bang!, your session is over and, guess what?  Everything you typed disappears once you sign back in again to continue. It’s ridiculous. 

Members are having to type out their messages in their computer word processors and then ‘cut and paste’ them into the forum applet in order to avoid losing all their work.  Who designs these things?

And my final user unfriendly Internet pet hate at the moment  is the auto-responder set up procedure whereby you build your newsletter only to find that on clicking next, the system seems to regularly hang. 

So I click the ‘Back’ button on my browser and find the newsletter just typed in has vanished.  Yes I know that I shouldn’t work on it live but nowhere are you warned about this when you sign up.

It’s happened enough times to me now that I have learned the hard way.  What are your Internet pet hates?