Looking for suggestion applicable to the Board in general, and also to members assuming the board remains the way it is…
I’m a visual person, so it takes me a really long time to associate any particular screenname with a mental idea of who the person is. Which is why I supported the idea of optional avatars - I would much more easily associate posts with a specific user if I had some image to latch onto rather than just a text name.
As it is, I have vague notions of only three users, one whose name is similar to an SDMB meme, one whom I met in real life once and have had a few communications with, and one who made some controversial posts and I found his screenname memorable because it was backwards.
So… anyone have suggestions for
Ways to make the SDMB more social / a community (i.e. when you see a post by somebody you have a sense of their identity / a feeling that they are a real person and not just an abstract concept).
Ways to have more of that experience, myself, without having to change the SDMB in any way.
I just want to comment on the idea of avatars. I think the place is pretty bare without them but they don’t necessarily help you associate a post with a person since on most forums, you can change your avie whenever you want. Often, just when you’re used to seeing a particular picture next to someone’s posts they’ll go and change it on you. Other people change them so often you never get your bearings.
I think there are a lot of good reasons for having avatars, but I’m not sure this would be one of them. I guess you could impose a limit on how often they could be changed. That might work.
I hate to play devil’s advocate here, but part of the reason I am still on this board is because it is not mimicing a social network site.
I like trivia, educated opinions, and snarky answers. I have paid attention over the past few years and so I recognize participants by name. On the LiveJournal boards I use, I know persons by name and not by picture, since the pictures can be changed more often than a tee-shirt.
Avatars tend to act as pictoral sigs, showing what the poster finds amusing today, not as photo IDs.
I know enough people in “Real Life,” I do not need to know my Internet friends the same way.
There are some social aspects to this board, but I really don’t think that the world needs another internet social network. Yeah, I have a Facebook and Livejournal account, but I quit visiting Livejournal when I realized that the majority of people were posting accounts of the tedious minutiae of their lives…down to their exercise routines EVERY DAY, and what they had for lunch. It’s interesting to read what lunch was at a four star restaurant…not so interesting to see that Tom had lunch at McDonald’s again today.
I really doubt that we’ll have avatars any time soon. Some of the staff are pretty firmly against them, and I think that most posters are OK without any sort of visual representation. I don’t know about other people, but I can generally remember the usernames of quite a few people…and I don’t know and don’t care what they look like. I can pretty easily remember that this particular person is a vegetarian, or a kook with pretty strange ideas about rape, or is what I consider to be pretty old, or knows a lot about books and publishing…what a person LOOKS like doesn’t really matter to me. Occasionally I’ve been surprised by the sex of someone, or by thinking that someone is white when s/he’s actually black, or something similar, but that’s OK. For the most part, it doesn’t matter if someone is black or white or yellow or red or brown, or what sex the poster is. We don’t judge people by the color of their skin here, but by the content of their posts.
Note that this is my personal opinion. I have knowledge of what various staff members think about avatars, but this post should not be taken as an official post or position.
One of the problems I have here is that the user names are often very long and not really intelligible unless you study them. As odd as it may sound, many I recognize by the visual pattern of the letters rather than what the letters actually say. If I ever had to search for posts from those people, I would have to find one and copy their name since there is no way I could ever recall it. Recognizing it isn’t a problem, but recalling it is impossible.
Not to get off topic, but why do so many people here have such long and seemingly bizarre user names?
I was always one of those who was against avatars, but now that I’ve gotten used to them, I quite like them (non-animated, of course). People can be pretty clever with them, so they can add a bit of fun / humor. Like the OP, I also have a terrible time keeping track of names – the visual association really helps me keep more poster identities straight.
It may help to note that it’s trivial in vBulletin to set the default setting of avatars to off, including for people who aren’t logged in, so allowing people who wanted them to use them wouldn’t change the look of the board to random passersby. Because you’d have to opt in, for anyone who disliked avatars the board would be indistinguishable from how it is now. Seems win-win to me.
Just to be clear, I don’t mean social in the sense of networking or journaling, but in the sense of, to have a notion of the person who is posting as a real person and not an abstract entity, such that the next time I see a post by them, I realize it’s the same person, and maybe remember what kind of viewpoint they are probably coming from. Otherwise, reading threads seems more like conversations between Anon878, Anon234, and Anon142.
Being a newbie I have to remind myself that it’s not really my place to be overly critical of how things are run. I would however like to add a +1 to the comments from BigT and Giraffe. With vbulletin, I think you could easily add avatars as an opt-in type of choice and no one would even notice it had happened. If you have to affirmatively choose to allow them, I don’t see how anyone could get upset.
Not meaning to be snarky, but it’s really not that hard to just pay attention to usernames. Most of us manage just fine, at least.
In theory, Avatars are a good idea, but in practice people (at least IME) tend to change them often they’re no good as an identifier. The person who had the Smiling Cat Avatar for months (thus earning themselves a mental designator of Smiling Cat Poster) might suddenly change to a dancing penguin for no reason, meaning that you’re going to miss their posts anyway because you’re looking for a smiling cat and not a dancing penguin.
Also, lots of people here don’t want a greater sense of socialisation on the boards, either.
Aye. I can barely stand to be social around the people I know in person, and then, only by trading Arrested Development references and obscure jokes about Unix shell commands. Love you guys, but the last thing I want to hear about is how your weekend went, or that little Sally stopped peeing her bed three times a night. And there are frankly about two dozen posters who I can identify by name (about a third of them are the Village Idiots that I avoid like a Jehovah’s Witness), which is probably just as well.
Yeah, but most people here aren’t administrators or moderators.
I fully support the avatar option. In fact, I don’t see a negative–they can be disabled in the control panel, allowing those who resist them to not see them. I do think it would help many people tremendously in remembering who’s who.
As for being able to change the avatar–sure, but that hasn’t been much of an issue (and it’s not even really an issue) with other forums I post to, and can’t see it being one with this demographic.
I rather like avatars, and I use them myself in places that allow them. However, the majority of the staff is against them, the last time we talked about it, IIRC. Part of the reason is because we’d have to screen every damn one of them, or else offer a limited selection for people to use.
And in the forums/social networks that I’ve seen them used, avatars are more like emoticons than distinct images. That is, someone might use a different one for each post, or change them every day or week, depending on mood. Avatars are more like clothes than faces, IME.
We allow text sigs. We don’t allow sigs with images, especially moving images.
I remember one person signed up, started a new thread, and the whole post said “It’s called signature ownage”…with some coding. Said person was quite put out that his/her monster sig wasn’t showing up.
The thing is, not allowing avatars appeals to a lot of people, who would not be happy if we did allow them. And then there are people who want avatars, and are not happy that we don’t offer them. While people can choose to view them or not, most people don’t go digging around in their user control panel on a regular basis, and don’t want to do that, either.
Different message boards/forums/social networks try to appeal to different groups. What appeals to one group will draw in more people in that group…and that includes avatars.
I like the board the way it is, avatars add nothing to the experience. I like to read what people have to say not what they choose to display at any given mood.