Who is my ‘administrator’ and why wont he/she allow me to use an avatar or private messaging? Is it all bandwidth?
~Ferry, newbie
The rule applies to everyone, and we disallow avatars / private messaging for various reasons, some of them being to speed up page loading time and to avoid overloading the message board server.
There are several administrators at the SDMB, amonst them
TubaDiva, C K Dexter Haven, Lynn Bodoni, Gaudere, Arnold Winkelried.
Buck, the Admins. cover the entire board and each also works as a Moderator for a particular forum as well.
Nobody gets PM or avatars here, simply because it’s one of the most populous and most extensively used boards, and they’ve chosen to disable them for the sake of keeping up speed and preserving bandwidth in an effort to keep focus on the post-content that I believe you would have to concede is more important.
Avatars are fun and PM can be useful at times, but e-mail is a reasonable substitute and I’m much happier seeing fairly quick responses to my requests for threads than seeing your desire to be represented by a tap-dancing rhinoceros (or whatever) fulfilled. (On two boards with avatars enabled, I use the squirrel-with-goggles that appears to be a Simpsons image, so don’t think I’m putting them down.)
That’s what I thought, but I wanted to be sure it wasn’t because maybe I didn’t have enough posts behind me or something. Thank you kindly!
~Ferry
(and polycarp, I would have chosen a hobbit, not a rhino giggle)
It warms my heart to see a newbie asking intelligent questions, being polite, and picking up board etiquette (eg. bolding user names) so quickly.
Cheers BuckleberryFerry. Welcome to the board.
Well, I aim to please, White Lightning! I’ve been to a few boards before and just want to be sure I get the hang of each. Every board is different, and I want to be sure I’m appropriate on each.
~Ferry, bowing.
Could that be Rocky the Flying Squirrel from Rocky and Bullwinkle?
And as for PMs, every once in a while we’ll have an MPSIMS thread asking for members’ IM names for the various IM services, so it’s not like we’re locked out of PM/IMing completely.
I wish every new poster had this philosophy.
Welcome to the SDMB!
Aww… you guys are sweet. ::curtsey:: Thank you kindly.
~Ferry
Nope. It’s a Simpsons pic - a squirrel with radioactive eyes. I remember it from an episode, using radioactive-eyes super powers to ‘laser’ through a tree branch.
Cute l’il thing.
Polycarp, that was the Monorail episode.
Forget avatars; I think we should all get our own private administrators.
Oops, I meant to address that to tavalla, even though Polycarp did first bring it up.