Friendpages = bad Why am I devoting a whole page of my site to how bad Friendpages is? Because they deserve the bad publicity, for being so lame. The other day, I found myself back at Friendpages, where, I am thoroughly ashamed to say, I once had a site. Friendpages, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is an online community of more then 318,000 homepages, divided into certain categories, including Business People, College Students, Lawyers, Gays, Clowns etc (see above). There are a great number of these sites, but I doubt if you'd find anything of much interest, even if you visited them all. Both the people who own the sites, and the hosts themselves, seem exceptionally retarded. The sites are very easy to obtain. Basically, you fill out a form, which includes your choice of handle, category, and details, and they immediately set up a basic site for you. It's as simple as that. They also send you a password, and then you can log in using your handle and password, to update your site. The handle, is the word that will be in your site's URL. So, if I was to choose a handle of "Friendpagesisaloadofshit" (that might be an idea...), my site's URL would be " http://Friendpagesisaloadofshit.com ". Each site is based around the same template. It looks reasonably professional, and has links on the mainpage to Articles, Pictures, Resume, Chatroom, Links, Feedback and Guestbook sections. So, these sites are almost recommendable in as much as you can get a decent looking site, without having to have any website designing skills, or, indeed, having to put very much effort in. So, what is so bad about them? Well, firstly, very few people who own these sites, actually make use of them. Most people who have them, probably couldn't even spell HTML, let alone actually incorporate it into their sites.Too many people just use their site to bore the surfer with details of their little lives, such as their age, where they live, hobbies etc, supported with a few pics. In fact, the Articles section of each site (see above), is more often than not, completely empty, as the owner of the site hasn't been bothered/couldn't think of anything to put there. As an example of how bad these sites are, you can do searches on sites for quality and/or traffic. All of these sites have Counters, hence this is how traffic is measured. The quality is measured be their voting systems. Allow me to explain this to you. Each site has a bit where visitors can vote for the site. They can vote under five categories: Poor, So-so, Average, Excellent or Awesome. I figure that they give you 1 point for every Poor vote, 2 for every So-So, through to 5 for every Awesome one. The total number of points gotten through votes is then divided by the total number of votes, to obtain your overall " score ", which is an average of the points gained through votes. For example, if 30 people had voted for the site: 10 voting it as average, 10 as So-So and 10 as Excellent, the total number of points would be 90 (10 mulitplied by 3, + 10 multiplied by 2, +10 multilied by 4), and your overall score would be 3 (the total, 90, divided by the number of voters, 30). Anyway, the highest possible score is 5, obtained if everyone votes your site as Awesome. When you do searches, it shows just how bad these sites really are, as the highest quality sites, and the sites with the most traffic, are still, for the main part, crap. In fact, a lot of the sites with the most traffic, have absolutely no content whatsoever. My site, I can say with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever, was one of the best sites ever to grace Friendpages with its presence. I actually had content, and got a reasonable amount of traffic to the site. This is another thing. Most of these sites seem to get around 5 hits a month, or something bad like that. Anyway, not all of the blame is to be put on the owners of the sites. Friendpages itself is fucked up, in more ways than one. These sites are regularly inaccessible for days on end. Very annoying when you have a site with them. Also, their chatrooms. Each website comes with a Chatroom (see above), but they don't even work anymore. Nor do some of the actual main Friendpages chatrooms, and those that do, are slow and irritating, and surely among the worst chatrooms in existence. The screen refreshes itself every 20 seconds, making communicating with others in the room very difficult, as their responses are often halfway down the screen by the time you get them. Their Guestbooks are rubbish, you can't customise them, and they only display 20 messages at a time. Then there are the changes that are made to these sites from time to time. Such as the doing away with the old Polls and Questions and Answers sections, the Chatrooms' adjustments, which caused them not even to work (see above), and the changes to each site's layout, which is always a change for the worse. Also, when I had my site, towards the end of its existence, I found that my site wouldn't let me add anymore links to my Links section, or Articles, to my Articles section. Like, when I tried to add a new Article, it said it had been done, but then it wasn't there when the site was viewed. I no for a fact that it wasn't just me who had this problem, as I know people, both online and in reality, who also had this problem. The help e-mail address they give you, of team@friendpages.com , is no use, as no e-mail sent seems to reach them. Once more, I know it is not just me, as I have friends who have also tried - from various parts of the world - to contact them, but failed. Quite annoying, as there is a lot that you can get off your chest in the form of an abusive e-mail. So, here you have it, a community of 318,000 odd homepages, practically all devoid of interesting content, all with Chatrooms which don't work, and all which can't properly be added to. Finally, there is the fact that you can't even do a proper search on homepages by quality, for some reason. You get given to links to lots of unstarted pages. Anyway, check for yourself how bad these sites are, by clicking around in the window above. Do searches, and visit some of these offending sites, in order to appreciate for yourself the sheer awfulness of these sites. Also, why not go for a chat in one of the Friendpages chatrooms which doesn't work, and talk to all the people that aren't there? If you find a site that is any good, tell me, and I will promptly faint and never wake up. You might even want to make your own Friendpage. If things are that bad. HOME