I just searched the list of custom avatars and there isn’t anything hosted at mugshots.com - if you want to PM me the username I will look at it. That is something I would remove despite it having to have been a matter of public record and somehow directly associated with their postings here or their username. That would also mean they had to have used their real life identity as their user name and if so, and they do have a public record, would you also be opposed to me calling a doper friend on the phone and telling them? What if I did with two friends? What if I wrote an email to a small group of Dopers who all talk outside the boards and let them know?
I do happen to agree this is something I would remove from the script as a courtesy but I’m also trying to make the point that if it’s something they posted on the board there really isn’t an ethical reason I shouldn’t share a link to it with a sub-section of my peers.
I was talking hypothetically in response to the post above the one you quoted.
However, even in your example, to my mind there’s a difference in digging up a pic from an old thread that only someone who goes looking for it, or accidentally finds it, will see and a script that searches for images and puts them there for people to use as my avatar (which I didn’t choose or opt into). Is it really that hard to imagine why some might feel this way?
That isn’t the intention at all and I wasn’t aware any of us are usually expected to have the consent of other posters in order to link to something they have posted or otherwise shared online. It comes up as a lesson in online privacy because some have irrational concerns that something they posted online in one context has been seen by others in a related but not quite exactly the same context.
But only if they are using an avatar script and want to see an image by your name, and only if you don’t have any otherwise specified image, and only if they want to allow the script default to be that image rather than assigning their own. Again how is this different than me having a group of SDMB friends to whom I send an email saying “hey, make this your custom avatar assigned to VT”?
Again, an image is only displayed to users of the script and only if that is the image that they elect to see. For one thing new users ( of the non super troll variety) are usually the first to jump into the avatar script and assign themselves an avatar because it is what most people do when they join a message board.
I beg to differ that it provides no value to any users, and most of them are surprisingly non-random. There have been several complaints and about a dozen ‘wow that is freakin cools’ through posts and PMs. After hearing the complaints my concern is more with not pushing my choices for custom avatars on the script users if they don’t want them.
I think it does add some value for some script users. But that is clearly a matter of opinion and from the few complaints I’ve heard, I agree it is something that should be an option and not a default setting.
I think everyone needs to calm down with the ethics and privacy violations talk. I like the script a lot and have opted to select an avatar, but it would be nice if the avs were limited to being either what was selected by the user or taken from someplace posters have voluntarily shared SDMB related photos, such as the photo gallery. But on a scale of “meh” through “massive ethical foul,” this rates as a solid “meh.”
It is actually kind of hard for me to Imagine in context. Imagine if you made a button on your computer which, each time you opened a message thread here, did a google search for related threads all over the web and put up a little window so you could read them alongside the thread here. So you open up a SDMB thread about the 2012 Presidential election, and a little sidebar fills in with information from CNN and Politico.com and others with discussions going on about the election at those sites. It is just a kind of nifty tool, you could use it or not, big deal. Now imagine someone else used that tool and while they were reading a thread here it displayed something you posted on Blogger.com on a related subject. It isn’t necessarily the exact format you intended your comments to be seen in, but it isn’t a violation of your privacy if someone else wants to read them in that way.
I get it. I’m not an Internet novice or a Luddite. I’ve been working and playing in the Internet for a very, very long time.
Photos, to me are different than text. They are a direct link to my identity. I also cannot check what images are being nabbed and associated with my profile without using the script. It’s happening outside the normal use of this board. Can I control what others do? Of course not. Can I have an opinion about it? Yup. My opinion is that I’m not thrilled about it.
Using your scenario, I would be unhappy if anonymous postings gets conflated with my real life identity in a way outside of my choice or control. That I post non-anonymously elsewhere doesn’t negate my attempt to stay somewhat private here.
This, a thousand times. I also agree it would be nice if it used selected avs only but it’s a great script. It’s fun. But the hysteria is a little over the top, IMHO.
Might I recommend TUMBLR as a source of photos? There seem to be a large number of “self taken” pictures, I’m sure there must be dopers in there somewhere.
It’s also worth pointing out here that anyone can remove themselves from the avatar script even if they don’t use the script. Why they would want to, or even care, remains a mystery to me. But due to anticipated objections from years of experience in avatar debate threads, that feature has been built in to the script as a courtesy for anyone concerned (rationally or irrationally - it doesn’t really matter AFAIC) from the very beginning. This is already discussed in the avatar thread.(and this discussion really should be going on there instead of a separate thread IMHO).
Beyond that ability, anyone who has a publicly hosted image somewhere that they are concerned might by be seen by the public can also remove that image from the web or make it private to only a designated audience.
I’m going to work on a way to make the default avatars optional - it is a little more difficult to put it into the userscript directly for logistical reasons I won’t go into here, but like I said my goal was never to force other script users to use my custom avatar list if they don’t want it, but rather just to make it available to them if they do. That is kind of what it amounts to in its current implementation, now with the benefit of hindsight, it should be an option.
I’m sure there are. Like I said about 95% of script-selected avatars are on the 3 major photo sharing sites. Seriously, anyone concerned about avatar users should do a simple search like SDMB Photobucket.
Thousands of self-selected photos, designs, avatars (literally avatars in use by that user on other sites) are returned. This isn’t some deep-creepy web crawl digging up obscure images from the dark corners of the interwebs, these are all available to the entire world at the touch of a button.
That’s fine and well as long as people take routine precautions. Visiting the website in this thread, specifically this website, produces an ordinary page in Firefox and an interesting Download button in Chrome. Click the download button and you get a setup.exe file that malwarebytes flags as a virus. Hey, it might be a false positive: the website with a dubious url claims to be delivering you 7zip.
Measure for Measure - you must have some kind of malware on your computer that is misdirecting your web requests. That big blue ‘Download’ button in your screenshots isn’t part of userscripts.org or the avatar script. The little green ‘install’ button at the top right of your images is the one people use to install the script.
A user script is never an .exe file - it is a text file that you can copy and paste into your browser without even using the online installer.
Possible - but that looks like an ordinary ad, powered by googleadservices. I don’t get it in Firefox. I just tried IE: it appears there. I guess my adblocker in Firefox is blocking the image.
Yes, in the past, I’ve used the green button in the upper right hand corner. Admittedly, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a download button in an advertisement.
To be safe I’ll be running a virus scan this evening: can’t hurt.
This is a screenshot of what the userscripts.org install page looks like. If you have some kind of adware or malware on your system (or on preview of your last post, perhaps if userscripts.org is hosting ads that I don’t see because I use an ad-blocker - people get hit by that kind of stuff here too if they see ads) then YMMV if you click on it.
But the light green ‘Install’ button is the only one that installs the SDMB Avatars script. I’m not sure why you think this may be relevant to the avatar script or why others should be careful using it when you are saying you clicked on an ad that is unrelated to it and got a possibly false-positive alert from your AV software.
Well it’s definitely relevant. Check out the screenshots: the page gives the (false) appearance that the (blue) download button is the one to push. (CHOOSE THE GREEN INSTALL BUTTON PEOPLE.)
I got the Download joy button on my Vista machine as well as my Win7 one. On my Ubuntu machine, I scrolled through a number of ads which userscripts.org is apparently hosting, but not the offending one. Like I said: people need to be careful: I would bet that the blue download button is indeed delivering malware, given the dubious and deceptive url that it links to.
It is relevant in that you were going to the userscripts page when a third party ad or bit of malware on your own system triggered some virus alert. You said that you know a usercsript isn’t ever an exe but proceeded to download an exe, and you said that you have used the green install button before and realize the big blue one was some kind of ad or other issue.
In either case seeing ads as you browse the web is irrelevant to the script and I’m not at all sure that ads are displayed there to other users of userscripts.org anyway. If it is some kind of adware on your system your ad blocker in Firefox may still be protecting you from it and it may not be visible to anyone else visiting the page, ad-blocker or no.
For what it’s worth, when I visited the userscripts page, I got a similar giant blue Download button, but it was arranged like this, which makes it impossible for someone who isn’t familiar with userscripts.org to know which thing they should click on. And when I clicked on the big blue button, I got a download of a .EXE file, which I obviously didn’t accept, but may obviously contain malware. It clearly isn’t a problem with the SDMB Avatar script, but userscripts.org isn’t exactly giving themselves a great reputation by allowing this sort of user trickery to occur.
ETA: It may be obvious once you know that whole thing with the big blue button and the 7zip logo is an ad, but it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that the 7zip logo and the text to the right of it is the ad, and the big blue download button is legitimate content from userscripts.org.
Sourceforge has those ads too. It was really obnoxious when teaching an intro to C course and getting people to install MinGW, “now when you go to Sourceforge to download it, click THIS button, not the 3-4 OTHER giant shiny download buttons.”
Yeah I disabled my hosts file that I use for ad blocking and I see an ad there too - not the big blue button ad but an ad nonetheless.
So apologies M4M - your comment was indeed relevant. Unrelated the script, but something people should be aware of as with ads displayed on any website. They are often sneaky and sometimes outright malware.
