Was this done manually by whoever runs nouilles.info and you’re just using the resulting profile pics, or did you request the website owner to create these profile pics be made from the SDMB portrait gallery?
Speaking as a user of the script, in your various categorizations of users/non-users of the script I think you left out one category, namely the one I belong to: I want to see avatars people chose for themselves. I don’t want to see how people look like from the portrait gallery if they have not specifically chosen to make those portraits as avatars.
I can describe several reasons for this, but mainly because when I see an avatar next to a comment I want to see the “image” the poster is trying to project on this board, and seeing how they look in real life does nothing towards that goal, and in some cases distracts from the comments, e.g. if I see “Oh, here’s the old dude again” or “Here’s the teenager”.
I understand that not all users of the script feel this way, but wanted to give you a heads up about one category of user that I haven’t seen you address. It would be nice if the script had the option to turn off automatically picking avatars (from the portrait gallery or from the internet at large) for people who have not specified one.
Of course they would. The parents of the tiny town in Footloose would have been just as happy, if not happier, if Kevin Bacon had decided not to dance all over the place. The teetotalers during Prohibition would have been just as happy, if not happier, if everyone had simply stopped drinking instead of buying bootleg whiskey from the mob and hanging out in speakeasies.
Yes the gallery includes small thumbnails for each user that has a big picture posted there and those are the logical ones to display for avatars because they are small in size and bandwidth use and don’t get scrunched up when displayed at a normal avatar size.
I wrote to Arnold (the admin of the gallery website) a couple of months ago via PM and then later by direct email, asking if he would prefer me not to link to them, or a different set, or use google’s or other web archive’s cached images instead. He hasn’t responded, and last time I looked hasn’'t been active here in almost a month. So without additional guidance I selected the smallest, lowest bandwidth versions of the portraits.
I appreciate this point of view. It does put you in the minority of script users from what feedback I’ve heard so far, and all the requests and arguments I’ve read in all the past threads here about avatars. As you know as the original author of one of the first custom-assigned avatar scripts here, you can always block or assign a different image to anyone. But I agree that too could, and maybe should be an optional feature. I think almost everything should be an optional feature - the problem comes up with limited time and coding ability on my part, and not wanting the nice, neat, simple script we have today to become a tangle of options and preferences that one needs to set up in order to get started.
But that option probably will wind up part of the bigger option to use custom-assigned default avatars at all (if and when it happens).
No the update to the avatar script that was posted a few days ago is totally unrelated to the default-avatar thingee. If you use Firefox and Greasemonkey for the script you should get that update to ensure future compatibility with Greasemonkey but it won’t influence whether or not there are default avatars chosen for posters who don’t have any specified.
if you use Chrome or otherwise it is totally optional - and probably won’t have any effect at all. The default-avatar selection was handled by the avatar CGI that the usercript talks to, and was available to everyone whether they updated to the new version of the userscript or not and is now unavailable to everyone pending future modifications to make it an optional feature.
That’s on searching Google Image Search on ‘sdmb cheshire human’s photo’.
Your search criteria sucks, and you also suck. I’m not surprised at all that people are upset at what it turns up, given what it turns up for me. The only reason I’m not calling for your head on a platter is that I don’t give a shit. You ain’t going to see me calling for the mob to restrain themselves.
Settle down, dude. I don’t think Crazyhorse’s script just blindly used whatever results it found. I think he was doing a bit of curating of the results and was only using ones he thought were legit. Or perhaps he employed advanced Colonel Klink detection algorithms, I don’t know. Whatever the case, he did not in fact produce all those terrible avatars for your name, so what are you getting all pissy about?
You might also note that I said: “The only reason I’m not calling for your head on a platter is that I don’t give a shit.”
I don’t give a shit, but searching on what he called a typical example (substituting my user name) gave that list of results, I can see why the people who do give a shit, would really give a shit. And he’s arguing that his script is innocuous. No, no it’s not. Demonstrably. The people bitching about it have a real reason to bitch.
The only posters that had images default-selected had results that didn’t suck. As I’ve mentioned there are like 140,000 registered users here. The script selected about 500 for posters who clearly wanted to share an image with the SDMB.
You didn’t ever have one assigned as far as I remember.
