I recently made a new forum account, because I forgot the password to this account, and it was just more convenient for me to make a new account, especially because someone thought it was a good idea to use the Google captchas that take 5 years to complete if you don’t yield to the Chromium regime
What I noticed is how broken this forum is for new users
Compared to my old account, the welcome page is broken, the userlist is broken, creating a new private message is broken, creating a new thread is broken, and viewing member profiles is broken
User profiles are also broken, all I can do on the new account is add my profile names from other services, such as Facebook, Google+ (Is this even a thing anymore?), YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram
On my old account, I can upload an avatar, background image, set my first and last name, set my gender, set a public email, set a homepage, tell my hobbies, say stuff in a description, set my date of birth, set my occupation, set whatever an ICQ number is, and set a signature, on top of what all I could do with the new profile
Something I can see that is broken for all users is the “Anzeige entfernen” page, it just renders a blank page with no data
I can see how this would have been overlooked, but it’s really bad for growth, because you’re giving new users the impression that the forum is in a state of disrepair, abandoned by the owners and left to rot. That’s what I thought until I dug for a browser profile with the cookie for this account, because I couldn’t make this post with the new account
Pretty much all the things mentioned are not broken, just restricted for spam prevention. The "Welcome" email you receive as a new user upon registering states the following:
Once a few posts have been written, you’ll receive an email informing you of the restrictions being lifted as such:
As for the ad issue you mentioned, I tested closing three types of them and nothing unexpected was encountered. It’s probably your browser and/or installed plugins. By the way, the ads on this forum are neither collected nor controlled by its administration (me) unfortunately. That’s all I’ll say. Do as you like with that info.