It’s exactly that. When it’s just text, it’s no big deal, but having any images, especially things like the one of a priest shooting a baby with a water gun that was posted in the “Were images turned off” thread, looks horribly unprofessional from a distance.
I’m not sure how practical it would be for you to use but take a look at Lynx. It’s a text-only web browser that looks like a command line terminal.
Yeah but there IS no bottom. This is a bottomless pit. Scroll forever and a day just to get to the bookmark place? Geeez.
Yes, and when you get there you will finally discover that 0.99999… = 1. 
Tip: Are you working on a desktop or laptop? Do you have the thread scroll bar (that some people have and some don’t)? Note, at the bottom of that it shows when the most recent post was made. Click on that, and it will navigate you immediately down to the end of the thread.
Somebody mentioned somewhere that this site does, in fact, function more-or-less passably even without JavaScript (which I find unbelievable, but I haven’t tried it myself). If so, imagine using this site with Lynx! I’d be all for it! Nice, simple, primitive, no whiz-bangs.
According to this Discourse thread, Lynx works for browsing but not logging in.
I’ll agree with the safe for work thing. It’s one thing if you’ve got ESPN open and you’re occasionally checking the score of a ball game or a golf tournament, in many offices, that’s ok.
But big images scream ‘goofing off’ And that goes double for people who might see your screen and have no idea what your job entails. At my last job, someone from my group always got forced onto conference calls that could last hours and you’d have nothing to do except listen to a bunch of techno babble that you don’t understand.
Anyway, I’m not enjoying the changes. I get that they’re necessary. I wasn’t expecting the learning curve to be so steep.
And, at least for me, I’ve been trying this week to move past quarantine and try to have some sort of normal life which doesn’t involve being online 18 hours a day. I’m going to try to get up to speed, as of now I fear that we will end up losing more users which will make this place even less of an interesting place to come back to.
Whereas the Straight Dope used to be the only message board I was afraid to open at work, because the ads were REALLY bad for a while, and included images I didn’t want my co-workers to glance at and wonder about. Other boards, with moderated images (that I could scroll away from and STAY away from if a moderator hadn’t gotten there yet) never caused me any problems.
I don’t seem to be getting ads on my work laptop anymore. Just a little white space that says “ad” if I hover over it. So I guess it plays more nicely with whatever my employer’s settings are.
Some people want us all to live in 1999 so that they don’t get in trouble when their bosses look over their shoulder. I guess the old Dope looked so boring, no one would mistake it for something fun you shouldn’t do at work.
1,000,000% this. The ads on Old Dope were horrendous, both content, NSFW nature, the fact that “SoCal Mom discovers 3 simple tricks to turn lead into gold – geologists hate her!” ads don’t go well with our message of fighting ignorance, and worst of all – the random PDFs that ads would toss into my Downloads folder until I got fed up and blocked all ads on the Dope
You’re making light of this, but I think there’s a serious point here.
Except there were at least two ways (TWO simple tricks?) to hide the ads. So far there’s no way for us to hide the avatars or other images.
And why do a few people seem to think it’s vitally important that everyone else see images whether they want to or not, even making disparaging remarks like:
How in the world would my being able to turn off images in posts cause YOU to live in the past?
If an option is added to let you hide images, that’s fine. If images are turned off, that’s not fine. And if images are turned off because there is no method that allows some users to turn off images while others have them on, and the outcry causes images to be turned off (and thats already happened – images ARE off, they justed missed one of the methods of adding images) then that is forcing the rest of us to live in 1999
- In the upper right, open the Customize and control Google Chrome menu by clicking the three horizontal dots. Select Settings.
- Click the Show advanced settings…
- Click on Content Settings from Privacy and security.
- Under the " Images " heading, unselect Show all .
- Click OK, and then close the Settings tab.
Even if you buy the notion that not having images is somehow “living in the past”, that past is June of 2020. Or August of 2018 for avatars. Images were never “turned off”, they were turned on, and less than a week ago.
The SDMB has been stuck in 1999 since 1999. Just because the Dope didn’t have images until recently doesn’t mean the rest of the world hadn’t moved on long since.
Images have been around for far longer than any of us have been alive. It has absolutely nothing to do with “living in the past”.
So far, I haven’t seen any convincing arguments for keeping images turned off. But “I can’t goof off at work anymore!” is about the least compelling argument I can imagine. If I felt that way, I’d be a little embarrassed to say it publicly—much less announce it in a tone of doleful solemnity.
Adding to this. Install AdBlockPlus. Configure to block avatars and images.
Two different ways to hide avatars and images.
Not that it concerns me personally, but that won’t help the people at work who probably are restricted from installing add-ons.