Design Most Difficult ACP?

[Arantor]

I think the admin panel could be organized a bit better. For example, why not put all settings in one tab rather than a settings page for each tab?

Mostly to avoid making individual pages very long. But there’s many things I’d do with it if I had the chance, but that ship has sailed.

 

[Bryn]

When I briefly tinkered with ProBoards years ago, I found its ACP rather clunky... then again it was for a test board

 

[Sinistra Sensei]

Forum software would have to be vBulletin I took a look at the version 6 admin CP its still way to much to handle. But that is nothing compared to Joomla and PHPNuke.

 

[fdk]

At some point in time I think I've used the admin panel of every major free and paid forum software, with the exception funnily enough of XenForo.

I personally found SMF very hard and confusing to use as an administrator, which is probably the reason why I gave up with it so quickly (this was many years ago however). I also found vBulletin to be somewhat confusing, and has a lot of unnecessary, useless (in my opinion) and annoying things in the ACP that just aren't necessary and would be ideal to make a toggle on/off setting to save space for admins who don't use them.

Of the free software, for me, MyBB was undoubtedly the cleanest feeling ACP with the easiest way to manage things, change settings & install plugins/themes and the like. phpBB also had a great looking ACP and I used phpBB3 to run my biggest forum for several years, despite the plugins/modifications system being rather complicated. The ACP for phpBB was more focused, in my view, on moderation/user/specific section management, all modifications/plugin/theme installations were done through cPanel with just a small tab for management in the ACP which made things super sleek and not at all cluttered.