Extremely specific website divided into needless specificity
There was trouble on the internet this week as it emerged that a one-make forum has far too many sub-forums.
The bafflingly excessive number of sub-forums came to light when internet enthusiast Bim Sligdee decided to investigate the site after buying an example of the car it exclusively covers. “It told me to register to view the forums so I did, expecting that the plural just meant there’d be a forum about the car and then maybe an off-topic one and perhaps another one for people buying and selling stuff,” Mr Sligdee explained. “But when I had my registration confirmed I was staggered to see about 28 different sub-forums for all aspects of the car, and another seven for things that aren’t to do with the car. Like, aren’t ‘jokes’ just part of ‘off-topic’ and also why does a one-make car forum need a sub-category for pets?”
Mr Sligdee claims his multi-forum misery was heightened when he had a specific question about the car he had bought. “I’d already had to take a couple of days off to plough through all the sub-forums, just trying to get a sense of the difference between a sub-forum labelled ‘technical’ and the one called ‘engine and gearbox’,” he claimed. “But then I realised I wanted to know if you could turn off the speed-related automatic volume adjustment on the stereo and basically I got so bogged down between the ‘audio’, ‘electronics’ and ‘how to’ sub-forums that I had to cancel a two week holiday in Gran Canaria to be able to get my head around all the inexplicable overlaps. Eventually I noticed that someone had already addressed this issue, but for some reason it was in the ‘general’ sub-forum. Oh God, it’s called general, why isn’t everything in there?”
Sniff Petrol tried to contact the one-make forum to ask why they have a deranged number of needless sub-forums but we posted it in the ‘any questions’ area and got told off by one of the admins for using the wrong sub-category and can everyone PLEASE read the guidelines before posting, even though it’s not clear where these guidelines are or what kind of pedantic psychopath wrote them.
