In the beginning… nobody had an avatar. And then the dawn came. When the script was first run by the first user, what they saw were any built-in vbulletin profile images people had in their user profiles, which are quite a few, and any avatar users who came on board and added a ‘SDMB Avatar:’ section to their profiles, plus any users to whom they assigned their own avatar which were often selected from the portrait gallery individually, and whatever other various places around the web.
Then as more and more people started using it, there were more and more self-provided avatars and people’s individual custom avatar lists were growing as they added more images from the portrait gallery, Dopefest threads, picture threads, and anywhere else that images of dopers could be located here or elsewhere in the public domain.
The next change to the script itself tried to facilitate this process by incorporating those types of images from all around the web right into the script so individual users didn’t need to do all the editing and pasting and web searching thousands of times among themselves when the script could just do it one time for everyone.
There was never a time that I, for my own use of the script, intended for there to be active posters for whom I didn’t see an avatar, whether it was one they chose for themselves or one I chose to see in lieu of, or despite, their own selection.
But because other script users pointed out they didn’t necessarily want to see avatars for posters that haven’t specified one just because I do, the idea was shelved at least for the moment to rethink the design, maybe to return as an option.
So long story short there was never a promise to those not interested in avatars that they wouldn’t have an avatar that was visible to others, only that they didn’t need to see or care about avatars either way if they weren’t interested in them. It would never have occurred to anyone to inform them of specific ways they could avoid having other people see an avatar when they don’t use or care about avatars. And if they did, then they would have been informed on all the options from the thread where they learned how they could get the script.
If you didn’t want something to be seen, you shouldn’t have posted it on the internet to begin with. This is what kills me about the whole thing. Bandwidth (if it’s not at a site like photobucket, as is the case on Arnold’s site – you should probably hold off until you get permission)
But people screeching about how everyone is now seeing a picture that they, themselves, have posted online, get no sympathy from me. Again, once you post something on the internet, you have no control over it. It’s not like Crazyhorse is hacking into your Paypal account. He simply found something that YOU posted PUBLICALLY. That’s it. Don’t want something seen? Don’t post it. Period.
On the one hand you say what happens on my computer is irrelevant and at the same time anyone running the script (my computer is running the script) is part of the problem.
How can our actions on our computers be simultaneously irrelevant and problematic? (you do know that the script runs on our computers, right?)
True.
Nobody’s computer is doing that.
Each person is running a script on their own computer and on each person’s computer, their own personal version of the script is assigning avatars (in some cases).
Out of curiosity, if I were to have a web page titled Pictures I Have Decided Are Correlated With Specific Straight Dope Message Board Members, which was simply a list of usernames and pictures which I’d found by looking through “post pictures of you” threads, profile pages, and Arnold’s gallery, would you object?
It’s worth noting here that out of approximately 1800 total avatars between built-in profiles, user selected avatars, and default selected avatars, only about 400 came from the image gallery.
Out of those 400 a good number are actually inactive posters and won’t be causing any spikes to the avatar requests, and out of those remaining who are active, many are using the avatar system anyway, or have a profile picture uploaded here already, and their gallery image isn’t used as an avatar. That leaves a very small fraction of the entire system being directed to the gallery. At least 90-95% are on the three major image sharing sites.
They are small images, and it is a publicly open server that is indexed by google and crawled by web archives. Normally one doesn’t need permission to link to an image on such a server and it certainly isn’t bandwidth theft, but I did PM and email Arnold to ask for his thoughts, and offered to link to the images in google’s cache or another web archive in case it would be any burden. He hasn’t replied, but the last time this whole thing came up and festered in an endless avatar thread it was before the script was completed to work a different way. After expressing some reservations about the system being proposed at the time, he concluded that it was OK with him if people wanted to use their gallery to host or link to avatars, he just wasn’t keen on it becoming the heart of an avatar system as was being proposed.
Since then the avatar system was reworked not to rely on the gallery or any work or changes from Arnold. And in a few months there are 3x as many active avatar users as there are active gallery users. Many of them were already linking to the active gallery images anyway so it seems like an obvious choice that is better for both avatar users and the gallery server.
Did Arnold ever restate that opinion? If not, I guess you have your answer there: He doesn’t want you linking to people in his gallery if they haven’t expressly consented to this use.
1000 apologies people, I haven’t had time to update the gallery in the past few months for personal reasons. I will be updating it this week-end for sure. I have many requests in my cue.
Referring to Eliahna’s post:
My opinion has not changed. Please do not use images from the SDMB portrait gallery ™ for avatar scripts. Thank you.
I’ve only skimmed through this thread, but regarding the topic at hand, I seem to understand that the avatar script is doing Google searches to find a random picture (that Google thinks is related to the username) to assign as an avatar to someone?
If that’s the case, I think that’s a bad idea. IMHO that feature should be removed.
Can somebody who uses the script tell me what avatar they see for me, please?
I’ve tried to edit my bio in User CP so you just get a white square, but I suspect either the joke photo of me with a fake moustache or a wedding photo (I’m now divorced) has been showing up on people’s screens.
Just a white square. Keep in mind that the script is back to only using ones that people have either chosen for the avatar system themselves or uploaded to the SDMB gallery.
