Avatards

[Guinastasia]

You know, for a board that supposedly is about “fighting ignorance” (:rolleyes:) this place is constantly exhibiting the opposite. This place is always priding itself on how smart and ahead of everyone else, but my god, what a bunch of luddites.

Over avatars. Baby Jesus is downright colicky.

@I_Love_Me_Vol.I

As long as avatars aren’t taking up space and interfering with the conversations in the fora, everything’s cool. Reminder: **WE ALREADY ALLOW AVATARS. ** They are located in the user profiles.

Note: that’s not an avatar. And that’s only available to members. :rolleyes: As has been pointed out to you.

Christ.

[Count_Blucher]

@Count_Blucher

@heatmiserfl

Don’t listen to these haters Buck. I got your back!

…and your Christ on a floor-mounted dildo*.
*Lysol wipes sold separately.

@heatmiserfl

Alright Jesus get up and let the other kids play.

Hey, just because you’ve accepted the Christ-shaped floor-mounted dildo as your personal savior doesn’t mean you have the right to strap it on & proselytize others. :eek:

Re-reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Well, OK… maybe you do… :smack:

but keep your Christ-Shaped Dildo Outta the Dishwasher!!!

CITE

[PlainJain]

@jsgoddess

Nothing is worse than dope memes.

A-mother fucking-men. Fuck avatars, let’s work on stopping tired memes… starting with ‘Hi Opal’.

@Guinastasia

 You know, for a board that supposedly is about "fighting ignorance"  this place is constantly exhibiting the opposite. This place is always priding itself on how smart and ahead of everyone else, but my god, what a bunch of luddites. 

Over avatars. Baby Jesus is downright colicky.

Preach it, sister.

[I_Love_Me_Vol.I]

@elmwood

@begbert2

I was on the side of allowing avatars since I can turn them off, but with this, no. I can’t turn off people talking about the avatars, so let’s just keep the crap out completely, eh?

I’m a charter member. I can’t turn off people talking about banner ads, embedded malware, and so on.

Really, on message boards with avatars, people don’t talk about them much. I can guarantee you that if avatars were enabled here, there would probably be at 100 instances of tired SDMB memes uttered (Hi Opal!, 1920s style death ray, etc) for every time someone makes note of an avatar. Even then, why would the rare mention bother you that much? Just filter it out, like some other Dopers do with the ceaseless Hi Opals and Monty Python quotes they can’t really do anything about.

I would offer that even when people don’t directly reference them, because they are information/data/content the change the thinking of people reading the thread, and so change the flow of the thread itself–even if sometimes it is subtle (sometimes it would be blatant).

For those of us who chose to not have to look at—whatever the hell picture someone opts to toss up, we would be outside of the conversation.

I don’t want to have to look at avatars in order to follow the full thrust of the conversation.

But as I’ve said–we already have the ability to post "avatars: (pictures) in our profiles. Isn’t that good enough?

[Guinastasia]

@I_Love_Me_Vol.I

But as I’ve said–we already have the ability to post "avatars: (pictures) in our profiles. Isn’t that good enough?

Again for reading comprehension: Only PAYING MEMBERS have this ability, dumbass. And that is NOT AN AVATAR.

Jesus Christ, you’re thick.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

Wasn’t “Avatard” a Genesis album from the '80s?

…or was it Roxy Music?

[Sarahfeena]

@jsgoddess

Nothing is worse than dope memes. The worst one? “This is the smartest board on the internet!” Yes, if the internet is solely comprised of the straightdope.com domain, and even then it’s a tie.

Yeah, it actually loses smart points when people cite lack of avatars as evidence that it’s the smartest board on the internet.

[Inner_Stickler]

Me, I’m having fun imagining the anti-avatar peeps in other social situations.

At the bar:
Me: I think I’ll have a Jack and Coke…
Anti-avatar people: NO I HATE JACK AND COKES DRINK WATER YOU GODDAMNED COMMIE SUNUVABITCH

At the video rental store:
Me: I think I’ll watch Kindergarten Cop
AAP: ABSOLUTELY NOT THE IDEA OF SOMEONE WATCHING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER ACTING MAKES ME WANT TO SPEW :vomit:

[Inner_Stickler]

@Sarahfeena

Yeah, it actually loses smart points when people cite lack of avatars as evidence that it’s the smartest board on the internet.

The dope has not been the smartest board on the internet since oh, 2002.

[Palooka]

You’re kind of obtuse, eh?

[Red_Barchetta]

@Inner_Stickler

Me, I’m having fun imagining the anti-avatar peeps in other social situations.

At the bar:
Me: I think I’ll have a Jack and Coke…
Anti-avatar people: NO I HATE JACK AND COKES DRINK WATER YOU GODDAMNED COMMIE SUNUVABITCH

At the video rental store:
Me: I think I’ll watch Kindergarten Cop
AAP: ABSOLUTELY NOT THE IDEA OF SOMEONE WATCHING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER ACTING MAKES ME WANT TO SPEW :vomit:

This actually made me laugh at loud. Thank you, sir.

[RaftPeople]

Mini Avatar                       Standard Avatar
                                                 
 /---\                              OOOOOOOO     
| * * |                            O        O    Hey Folks, Listen Up!
| --- |  "I just got back from    O [O]  [O] O   
 \___/    the dope and all I      O          O   This advertising space is
          got was this lousy      O    o     O   going quick. We're posting
          Avatar."                O          O   in 3 forums currently so
          --jsgodess              O [_____]  O   there will be lots of eyeballs
                                   O        O    on your ad.
                                    OOOOOOOO     

[Inner_Stickler]

@Palooka

You’re kind of obtuse, eh?

No, just observant.

Thank you for the compliment, Raftpeople. If I make one person laugh in a day, I can sleep well.

[Red_Barchetta]

@Inner_Stickler

Thank you for the compliment, Raftpeople. If I make one person laugh in a day, I can sleep well.

That was actually me, Red Barchetta. See if only we had avatars, that might have been prevented

[Gustav]

@Sarahfeena

Yeah, it actually loses smart points when people cite lack of avatars as evidence that it’s the smartest board on the internet.

I don’t know, I think there might be an argument to be made. It’s not that a lack of avatars makes people smarter, but think of it backwards: what kind of people do you suppose will look at this forum and say to themselves “I will rather post somewhere else instead, because I can’t have a picture of my favorite lolcat next to my name”? Probably not many, but it stands to reason that filtering out such people will elevate the average level of discourse. And it really doesn’t take a huge amount of shit posters to significantly drag down a forum.

[spinky]

@Shot_From_Guns

This thread had me tingling so hard, I almost had to drag it off to a closet for some personal time.

See, there’s absolutely no way this would have happened if bucketybuck had his picture on every post.

[MrDibble]

@elmwood

How about this hypothetical situation: a gifted coder creates a Mozilla plugin for the SDMB, which displays tasteful, small, static avatars other SDMB users have uploaded to a remotely-hosted database? The people with the plugin can see avatars by a user’s name, while those who don’t have the plug-in can’t. What does the “no avatars for anybody, even though I can turn them off” crowd feel about something like that?

Doesn’t sound like it would entail any performance hit here, I’d be all for it, if it was enough for the pro-avatar people…

[Count_Blucher]

[hijack]

heatmiserfl, IOU an apology.

First, I don’t really care about avatars. I’m not any sort of nobility any more than you are a 2D Rankin Bass cartoon. In the big scheme of things, a couple thousand pixels more or less really
isn’t going to change that. We are what we believe, what we say, how we act, and who ultimately through those actions, who we will choose to be.
Next, there’s that whole ugly dildo thing.
Sorry.
I’m not even sure why I teased you. We should all have somebody who has our back.

PS- Would have sent this privately, but I cant. Still needed to be said though.

[/hijack]

[heatmiserfl]

@Count_Blucher

[hijack]

heatmiserfl, IOU an apology.

First, I don’t really care about avatars. I’m not any sort of nobility any more than you are a 2D Rankin Bass cartoon. In the big scheme of things, a couple thousand pixels more or less really
isn’t going to change that. We are what we believe, what we say, how we act, and who ultimately through those actions, who we will choose to be.
Next, there’s that whole ugly dildo thing.
Sorry.
I’m not even sure why I teased you. We should all have somebody who has our back.

PS- Would have sent this privately, but I cant. Still needed to be said though.

[/hijack]

Wha? I…forgive you?

[Sarahfeena]

@Gustav

@Sarahfeena

Yeah, it actually loses smart points when people cite lack of avatars as evidence that it’s the smartest board on the internet.

I don’t know, I think there might be an argument to be made. It’s not that a lack of avatars makes people smarter, but think of it backwards: what kind of people do you suppose will look at this forum and say to themselves “I will rather post somewhere else instead, because I can’t have a picture of my favorite lolcat next to my name”? Probably not many, but it stands to reason that filtering out such people will elevate the average level of discourse. And it really doesn’t take a huge amount of shit posters to significantly drag down a forum.

It doesn’t concern me too much, because all the people arguing pro-avatar, I already know to be good posters. For that matter, the people arguing anti-avatar I already know to be good posters. So I’m guessing there’s not that much correlation between posting quality and avatars, which I’ve observed on other boards, as well.