About.com

Look up almost anything on about.com and you will find either:
1. An article that tells you almost nothing, or
2. An article that is full of errors and misinformation.
The about "education" site is even worse, since it presents itself as a resource for teachers and students to use. Stay away!

Alright, autoplaying videos are probably one of the most annoying things on the internet, and this site has them. That's already an immediate "avoid" of the site any time I see it in the future, but get this: If you pause them, scroll down, and scroll back up, THEY PLAY AGAIN.

Did someone have a stroke while they were coding at About.com? Who the hell thinks that makes sense? At least auto-playing videos might be useful for the non-savvy, but if someone pauses a video it means two things. 1) They want it paused. 2) They know how to resume it in case they want to.

About, tell your coders to go back to their desks for a bit and use some common sense.

I decided to start buying rolled oats in bulk like my parents did when I was younger. They would buy 50 pounds and store in closed buckets in basement for up to 2 years. I do not have a basement so went looking for advice on how to store without a basement. This is a quote from an About.com Home Cooking "expert".

"Like all grains, rolled oatmeal should be kept in an airtight container to discourage moisture and vermin intrusion. Store in a cool, dark cupboard up to three months or refrigerate up to 6 months. Due to its high oil content, oat bran should be refrigerated.

By Peggy Trowbridge Filippone
Home Cooking Expert

This woman thinks rolled oats can only be kept 3 months in the pantry. Heck the "for best quality" date on the two 5 pound each packs I just bought is 15 months away just leaving it in the dang cardboard box. How can you call yourself a cooking expert when you don't even know proper storage times for a staple pantry food like simple rolled oats?

Up until November 2014, Ingrid Bauer at about.com provided excellent German lessons. She was then replaced in spring 2015 by one Michael Schmitz, and since then German about.com has been a disaster; poor English (it is not his native language), spelling errors in the German (apparently no proofreading done), and instead of providing language lessons (grammar, idioms etc.) he gives long rants about his political opinions, made even less legible by his need to italicise every other word. Since about.com provides no email contact directly to the company, one can only hope that some day the owners of this company (at 1500 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York, NY, *******, apparently) will figure out that they are paying an incompetent boob to run their German language site.

I was just looking to see what non-Western music for kids brought up and a woman (Espie Estrella) wrote a whole three or four paragraphs on non-Western music. Obviously, it was full of inaccuracies - she mentioned grass skirts, etc. are related to Hawaiian music - they are not. Please, about.com do not try to put a complex thing into a paragraph unless the person is an expert in their field. I don't ever use about.com because it's full of inaccuracies and cannot be replied to or edited by readers. A half-educated person is very dangerous. About.com is about money, not education.

This is the most useful site for web hosting issues I have ever found. I have wasted a lot of time (and consequently yet more time and also money later) following the advice of other supposedly unbiased web hosting reviews. About.com offers real reviews from real people; as far as I know it is unique in that respect.

There is also a wealth of down-to-earth useful information on web site creation. I really regret not having stumbled on this site earlier. I'm bookmarking this site for sure!

I read the article, I read the comments, and I decided to add my comment. It asked me to sign up to leave a comment. I did! It gave me a box to write my comment in. I did!

After I spent 15 minutes thinking and typing, I hit the "Say It" button at the bottom. It told me "Sorry this article is closed to comments." and my comment disappeared. I couldn't even copy it to put somewhere else after all the work and thought I put into it. It was just gone!

Thanks About.com for wasting my time. Why didn't you just put a notice that no comments were allowed on that article any longer! Since comments were allowed just recently, my mind reading abilities failed to detect that the box for comments was just for looks.