please god no
Your post says no but your avatar says yes.
A big flaw in this logic is that this is something they would need to opt-in to in order to decide to opt-out of, and they are under no burden to do anything at all. It isn’t a system created for the benefit of people who don’t want to use it, but rather for those who do. It can’t be an ‘unwanted avatar’ if they don’t use avatars and if they do, they can set it to whatever they want it to be.
I will look into making a way to allow users of the script to turn the default avatar feature on or off as they wish. Right now it is handled by the avatar CGI and not directly from within the userscript. In the short term of course any avatar can be replaced or blocked by editing the user script for individual users, but I will try to make a global on/off switch that allows you to turn them all off at once if you wish. I also kind of liked knowing who was seeing avatars by virtue of them having one specified themselves, so I can see a use for such a feature. FWIW a lot of people use the script to see avatars but don’t specify one of their own, so you actually didn’t know what you thought you knew by basing any assumptions on who had a visible avatar.
It’s not a copyright or ethics violation to link to external images here whether it is in a post, profile text, or a user script.
I can see your avatar. Do you mean that you don’t see any? If you have any questions about using the script please post to the script thread - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=15699446 or just PM me if you like and I will try to help figure out what’s wrong.
Is it deep linking to the images? if it is, then while maybe not an ethics violation, per say, it’s usually not considered the most considerate thing to do.
It is my understanding that the script is currently pulling avatars for every poster on the board who somehow has their username affiliated with a picture, so for example, a user who has not installed the script but has uploaded a photo to Arnold’s gallery will have that photo displayed to everyone who does use the script. Is that an incorrect assumption?
Yeah, I’m not liking this. How is this different from the Goon squad making a popup over each poster’s name with their address and phone number on it, without that person’s consent or knowledge? Damn. I need to check what my AV is now.
Most of us use pseudonyms here because we want some privacy, you know.
Not entirely. According to the front page of the site there are 140,949 total users. By my best guess about 500 may have specified avatars and/or have a profile picture uploaded, about 50-100 have pictures published on dopefest photo galleries hosted around the web, an additional 500 or so have been located randomly by the avatar script, and the SDMB Portrait gallery has about 400.
If you google image search “SDMB photos” or “Dopefest photo album”, or “SDMB photo of me”, etc. you will see a metric crap ton of images hosted out there all over the web. The owners of those sites are doing no more or less than the users of the avatar script: displaying images to viewers.
Your avatar is: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/image.php?u=18532&dateline=1226751425&type=profile
The difference is instead of a popup over each posters name with their address and phone number on it, it is an avatar by their posts with an image of them or something they linked to.
If you post your name and phone number in a public thread here it will be scooped up by google and a thousand other web crawlers as well as being archived forever on at least a dozen internet archive sites.
Am I crazy or does anyone else see a bright ethical line between a dopefest photo album and a script that trawls the net collecting photos that might be associated with your username?
I’m fully prepared to admit that I’m the crazy one but I don’t see what added benefit we get by having pictures posted beyond the ones in the avatar:link format, member pic uploads and arnold’s portrait gallery. Choosing to not have an avatar is as valid as choosing to have one and I think that choice should be respected.
Make no mistake, I am deeply appreciative of what you and spinky and everyone else has done. I certainly could never code a script like this and I know you are doing it for free on your own time. But I would like for those who don’t want this service to know that those of us who do respect their decision to remain a little more private. A picture hosted on a photo service in some rinky-dink album probably won’t see as much traffic as a photo hotlinked on a messageboard and links in posts get buried as soon as the thread falls off the front page but an avatar shows up on every post.
But only to those who use a script to see avatars - not the entire world wide web or even the entire SDMB audience, to both of which they are all already currently shared anyway. I don’t think you are crazy and I sort of understand the concern but maintain that it is misguided.
As far as the rinky dink dopefest sites, I mentioned them because that is one of the first places many avatars were located by the script. The next most common place is photobucket or imageshack galleries that were publicly shared either in posts or profiles. The randomness of google image searches makes it a last resort type of thing and was added mostly for the technical neato-ness while learning how to write some scripts. They provide at least some avatar that might be relevant to the poster.
I agree that choosing not to have an avatar is as valid as choosing to have one for those who use or care about avatars. But for those who don’t, I can’t understand the interest in what other people might see when viewing them.
A group of people could get together in person and have a internet party, surf the web, and look at photos that have been posted somewhere. Those who posted them might not ever have anticipated this but it isn’t really any different than their intended audience viewing them in some other context as far as privacy, ethics, or what have you.
A person could pose for a photo for a newspaper article and later find that kids in school cut their photo out along with others and made a collage for an art class project. They may have only intended for people reading the article to see the photo in that context, but they also must understand it might be seen by anyone in any context.
As far a the intended benefit, to me at least, it is the same as the benefit for having avatars at all - to associate an image with a poster and maybe even gain some insight into their tastes, personality or appearance. The script has always been customizable by the individual user, allowing you to assign custom avatars to other posters at will. This is sort of like me taking my list of custom avatars and sharing them with all the users of the script, but instead of posting in a thread with 500 lines of code I just built it into the system.
I realize now not all of you see this as a benefit and I don’t want to force my custom avatar list on anyone that doesn’t want it, so I am going to work on a way to turn the feature on or off.
It is done here a thousand times a day every day by people posting direct links to images in message threads.
The subject has come up before, where an angry webmaster for example once opened a thread here to complain that people were linking to his site’s images. Ed Zotti, I think, or one of the TPTB anyway, ruled that was not against board rules nor any copyright infringement.
The “violation of privacy” issue is stupid, since it’s another case of “don’t post something on the internet if you don’t want people to see it.”
HOWEVER, I do think there could be an argument made for bandwidth theft. If you want to make a place holder, you could always assign someone an avatar. Because couldn’t this be considered hot linking?
I think it differs when you post a link to a picture, vs actually displaying said picture, although not being an expert in scripts, I could be wrong.
There’s a difference between purposefully posting an image I want people to connect to my name and having my image connected to a username I purposefully keep anonymous, don’t you think?
I saw a poster in another thread with an avatar from “Mugshots.com.” Maybe they uploaded it themselves as a joke, but if not and it is a picture of them, it is certainly not by their choice that it’s on the internet.
Statements like this give me the concern that somewhere along the line, this project of yours changed from “let’s create something beneficial for those who wish to participate” into “let’s teach everyone a lesson about how anything they post online can be used without their consent.”
My avatar is (as I just recently confirmed) my photo from the SDMB portrait site—which is fine, I expected that it would be seen by other board members. But if I hadn’t posted anything there, my avatar could well be (based on a Google image search of my username) an image of Vincent Gallo in his underwear, just because I happened to link to that photo at some point in the past, and I never would’ve known it. Other posters would likely assume that I chose that avatar because I somehow identify with Vincent Gallo in his underwear, which is not the case. And what of new members who join the board, who may not even be aware of the avatar script or what it’s doing? (Not the Troll of a Thousand Faces… I mean real, actual innocent people who join and may be completely unaware that every one of their posts is accompanied by an image they didn’t pick out.
IMO you’re well advised to make “no avatar” the default, and allow people to opt in if they wish. If script users want to assign an image to a particular poster—e.g. the inside of goatse guy’s rectum for Vinyl Turnip—they should be free to do so.
From the other thread
[QUOTE=Crazyhorse]
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Custom assigned avatar - If a user of the script assigns a custom avatar to any poster that avatar will be displayed to them in that poster’s posts regardless of any of the following.
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Lacking a custom avatar assigned by the script user, the first place it looks is the poster’s SDMB profile text - If the profile text contains "SDMB Avatar: ", whatever is listed as that URL is what the script will try to display to script users. If the url is a link to an actual image then that image is what the script will display but if the url is ‘none’, or anything that doesn’t resolve to an image, the script will display no avatar for that poster and won’t go on to additional steps below.
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If there is no custom avatar assigned by the user, and no URL specified in the poster’s SDMB profile text, the system then displays the poster’s built-in SDMB profile picture if they have one uploaded. This is only available to paying members, mods and admins but there are quite a few of those.
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If there is no profile picture in the SDMB profile, the system may pick up any image available anywhere to display as a default avatar for that poster. This could include Google images, Facebook, personal websites, image galleries, links posted in “picture threads”, etc.
[/QUOTE]
I think it’s best if option 4 is removed.
Options 1-3 make sense.
Option 4 provides no value to the viewers of these random avatars, and also since they weren’t selected by the person whom the avatar represents, but are just random pictures they may have linked to or posted in the past, I can see why some people would feel uncomfortable with this setup.
Literally about 95% of avatars are from photobucket, imageshack, and flickr. And most of the rest are blogging sites like twitter, blogspot, wordpress, etc. These are all sites that were intended to host images for direct-linking to a worldwide audience.
Just a few appear to be either personal websites or other and I think they probably should be removed as a matter of courtesy to the site owner, even though linking to the same image in a post here, which has already been done, will lead to clicks for years into the future, even after the thread has died when new users find it on google. And that is considered completely acceptable by almost everyone posting in this thread because they have done it and clicked the links that others post.
Either way the bandwidth use for avatars is fairly small. It only adds up to a fraction of what we link to every day in posts here. Most avatars are small and they get cached by your browser for at least some time depending on your settings, so you don’t make a new request to wherever it’s hosted each time you see the avatar.
I’m not sure I follow. The image that I choose to view by your name in posts was something that you did purposely post in order for people to connect the image to your username.