So, bear with me, guys, this is something that I've been dying to get off my chest for a while. 😛
Tabs on forums have always been my pet peeve. They make a forum difficult to navigate, difficult to keep track of what's going on, and just generally harder to get a grasp of. They make the forum feel daunting. In most forums, everything is there on one page, so that you can scroll down and get a feel for how the forum is structured instantly. But forums with tabs just seem messy. Too many clicks. Too many sections. Too difficult to use.
Anyway *Cosmic takes a deep breath* I guess that's all I have to say. 😛
I've only ever seen tabs on a few sites... and I hated it each time. Having tabs was little more than a gimmick to cover up the fact they had way too many forums and not really enough activity to justify it. It made looking around the site more difficult than it needed to be. (Since going back often meant having to reclick the tab you were viewing too since it'd default you to the home tab rather than whichever you were viewing.)
I hope they remain a rarity because they're inconvenient, often ugly and do the site no favours.
Tabs are one thing for a browser, but on forums they are not needed and really do ruin any chances of that forum taking off. Using tabs just gives your forum this "empty" feeling and unless you are in need of SERIOUS organization you really should never use tabs. The majority of sites that I have seen use tabs are leakers and sites that have illegal content on them which doesn't help the reputation of any forum.
I find tabs just more distracting than anything else, you don't need to make your forum smaller like tall these phone carriers are doing, you need good content and a good size forum to bring members in, adding tabs just makes it small and empty. It's a forum killer and I wish more people saw that.
I don't actually mind tabs because it displays the forums/sub-forums that you're mainly interested in. Good if you're only into a certain section of a community. 😛
I think I've only seen it on one forum so far, seems like it works well.
Tabs don't really annoy me though they aren't something I personally would use. They do make a forum look unstructured and a little bit "Messy" but it is the owners decision and I respect that in some cases though as previously stated, I wouldn't use them
I honestly never knew there was so much... anti-love for tabs haha! We had it for Languavel for a while but the activity just... died! There were other contributing factors to this but we finally decided to try removing the tabs and see if that changes the activity level and it did get better once we removed them.
I remember back in my mybb days, forums with the 'tabs' plugin installed could be easily hacked due to a vulnerability the plugin created...
[youtube]SIMEwsZ5oA0[/youtube]
But yeah, they are unattractive and make things uncomfortable for the average user. If you like it (and you're the admin) give members the option to disable it and/or provide an alternate theme without tabs.
I'm the complete opposite. I love tabbed forums as long as they're of a decent size with good activity. Each "tab" is like a hub. Seems to make everything neat and easy to navigate in my opinion. I do agree that it's harder to keep track of what's going on though. 🙂
