Many of us have experience with having our own custom avatars now, and I’m curious what the feeling on the Dope is about adding avatars to our Doping experience. Since vBulletin has the capability to turn avatars off if you’re a work-surfer and that’s a concern, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t join the 21st millennium and start having avatars here.
I think it’s silly and trivial not to turn on avatars (with the option to shut them off for those that are annoyed by them).
Just turn that feature on already. :rolleyes:
I prefer to keep the Dope text only.
I don’t see any point to them; they’re distracting and … well, pointless.
The two splinter boards both allow avatars but I think they both have a less “formal” feel than here. I wouldn’t mind them but I don’t know if they would be a good fit with the culture here.
Then you’d simply just uncheck the option “Show Avatars” in your User CP.
They should be on for those of us who like them, and off for those of us who don’t.
Agreed.
This, of course, is the epitome of common sense and fairness.
You can stop posting now, we understand your position.
By rights, this should settle the matter.
I don’t think it’s that simple: if avatars are enabled, they will be content–if you turn them off, there will be comments made by others that you don’t understand, things people assume you know that you don’t, misunderstandings based on uneven information.
This is also true of Google ads and signatures, and I don’t think that the board has been negatively affected by either. (I mean, with respect to causing problems because some people can see them/comment on them, and other people have them turned off.)
I vote for having them turned on, with an option to keep them hidden if you prefer.
Understood, however, your thoughts (and a few others) on the matter don’t address this fact. Rather they seem to almost ignore it for some reason.
In contrast, Manda JO makes a good point. I think it’s a trivial point that can be easily rectified by turning on Avatars temporarily if a thread or post references one, just to see what all the talk is about, then easily turned back off. But I believe these cases would be pretty rare. Rare enough to render this point nominal.
I disagree. I think that the content of the board has been negatively affected by google ads. People regularly comment on the google ads, and it often ends up as just that much more noise crowding out the good content on the boards. It’s not nearly as bad as when they first started, but it’s still a negative, in my opinion.
Avatars might be even worse, because you’d get someone making a joke related to some poster’s avatar, then someone who doesn’t have them turned on will not understand, then there’ll be clarification, then who knows what.
Maybe some people think that the ad or avatar-based conversations are good, maybe they think they’re a downside and they’re worth it. I don’t.
Avatars are fun; discussions about avatars are fun. Fun is good. People are able to easily turn them off (or keep them off, and turn them on if they want them). Choice is good. I really don’t see a good argument for not allowing them here other than, “We don’t do that because we’ve never done that.”
I don’t know how the technical side works, but would there be a bandwidth issue?
Part of it goes to overall tone, I think. The Dope is a fairly serious board, with a couple of forums for lighter stuff. Being text-only reinforces that, subtly.
The Dope r srs bzns. 
But you still get your serious board if you keep avatars off - what do serious people care if other people are having fun and seeing avatars (other than the afore-mentioned possible discussions of avatars)?
Exactly. Unless there is a 100% guarantee that adding avatars would have no impact on the work foisted on the poor hamsters that keep this board running, we shouldn’t even think about adding avatars.
And if avatars would have some modest impact on the hamsters, then improving the search function is clearly the more important issue that needs to be addressed first.
Plus, I hate avatars and fun.