If that is your idea of tasteful avatars, you are not doing your cause any good. They are freakin’ gigantic.
What they said.
I’d make the avatar even smaller than others have suggested, 50x50 at the largest.
But I would also add:
- At extra cost. In other words, a fee-based perk, for paying members only, not for guests. You want to stick a picture of Hello Kitty or Seth Rogan or a praying mantis on your posts, you pay a few bucks in addition to the “no ads” fee. Any time you change it, another few bucks. This ought to cover staff overhead, policing potential violations of copyright and taste. And if you step over the line, by uploading a dog’s asshole or whatever, you lose the ability to have one, period.
Provided all of that is done, I’ll grudgingly vote in favor.
What staff overhead?
You can have my dog’s asshole when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
The village can choose to have a Wal-Mart. However, you’re all reacting as if a Wal-Mart is heading to town, when in reality it’s just some updated street signs.
As I’ve written before, not all implementations of avatars are what’s seen on teen and gamer boards, with huge animated monstrosities. Opal’s url=“http://fathom.org/FFF”]Fabulous Forums of Fathom and Una’s Unaboard include them, they’re tasteful, and they don’t detract from the content. Here’s a thread on my site, which has an audience of professionals in a niche field; do the avatars (non-animated, 80x80 and 3K max) look obnoxious, or dumb down the content?)
In older threads, some people believe that adding avatars will attract an immature L33T!!!1!!one crowd to the site. Seriously, I have no idea of the logic of their thinking. The SDMB’s subject matter and culture just doesn’t appeal to them. Why would the presence of avatars suddenly draw the one-line LOL crowd in like flies?
Let’s face it: Dopers HATE change. They hated this color and font scheme when it was first implemented with the 2.X->3.0 update, they hated the idea of an edit window, and now they hate the thought of avatars. If the site is ever updated to vBulletin 3.7, Dopers will be marching on the headquarters of CL with pitchforks and Molotov cocktails.
I am a very visual oriented learner. I came here to post “Yes, subject to the following conditions…” But ultrafilter nailed it for me.
Based on previous threads, I’ve learned that the display of avatars can be turned off.
Therefore I don’t see why it’d be a problem (subject to the conditions).
No avatars…please, God, no!
I agree completely. The goal should be to bring in more people, not keep them out. Those that don’t fit in will not want to come back. Too many of the same names going at each other in the same retread threads. If dragging the board into the 21st century will help sagging board usage then I’m all for it.
Too bad you couldn’t have been my girlfriend way back when. It would have done wonders for my self-esteem issues.
William Poundstone’s new book, Gaming the Vote, looks at ways of voting that captures intensity of feelings rather than just winner take all plurality voting.
It’s relevant here. The people that want avatars think they might be helpful in several ways. The people that don’t want them hate them with a passion and consider allowing them to be equivalent to opening the gates for the barbarians. Few seem to be indifferent.
So how to decide? An up-and-down vote? Or does intensity triumph?
I vote for intensity.
No avatars. No talk of avatars. No threads about other peoples’ avatars. No pitting peoples’ avatars. No diverging the point of the Board away from words. No uploading, no storage, no hamsters dragging baggage behind them. Our -1000 trumps your +5.
Nay.
If you are going to call those gigantic you aren’t exactly showing much objectivity and thus not doing your own cause any good. Those avatars are 65X65 and take up about the same amount of space as the user info listed on the opposite side of the post-header.
eta: Exapno Mapcase, regarding intensity: I would lay serious money that less than 1% of the people outraged at the thoughts of avatars would actually leave if small ones were instituted. Where they going to go? Google groups? Last refuge of the text-only demanding neo-luddites.
Could be. But I’d wager even a smaller percentage of those wanting avatars would leave if they are denied.
So the market wins. 
So if I disagree with you, I am not objective?
Apples and alter boys. I want this to be a text only board. I would get rid of smileys if I could.
I don’t understand how not wanting loud avatars makes me a Luddite. I want the board to run well; to that end, I want the latest vBulltein software. There is a reason they give us the choice to turn on avatars, you know. If it were an irrefutable fact that avatars always improve every board, they would be hard coded in. They aren’t, just as image tags and HTML tags are optional as well. Am I Luddite for opposing those as well?
Firstly, I didn’t accuse anyone here of being a luddite, I was just categorizing people who are still hang out at Google groups of that. But calling those avatars “freakin’ gigantic” simply because you want none at all is why I said you lack objectivity.
That’s neither here nor there. None of the people suggesting avatars are anywhere near as vehement as those opposing. I am saying that outrage is overblown. And you can’t say “the market wins” unless you have given people the option of avatars and see the results. Let’s try it for a year and see if we get more recruits that way or if being text-only really is the major draw some Dopers seem to think it is.
Will they still slow down the servers when people who have them turned on load threads?
I vote No. And if they MUST be added, they should be very small and non animated.
No.
I don’t prowl dozens of boards, but the avatars I have seen seldom reveal anything about the poster, even the ones with a photo, which may or may not be a photo of the poster.
A ripoff is a ripoff, whether the owner sues you or not. What does it tell me about you if you run a Monsters, Inc. logo or Homer Simpson’s handsome face? Nothing.
I have seen many posters who, feeling they should have an avatar, post a bland USA eagle, or some such generic image. Again, have I learned anything useful about the poster? No.
Some will post the copyrighted logo of a university, leaving me to wonder if this is from a student, a faculty member, a student’s parent, an alum from 1952, or some receptionist’s assistant who thinks the quarterback is hawt. That narrows it down to 82,000 people.
Here’s the one thing most of the anti-avatar crowd people don’t seem to get. Avatar display can be turned off.
For the people that support avatars, the ability to turn avatar display off satisfies the preferences of the anti-avatar crowd. It’s a win-win scenario for both the avatar supporters and the anti-avatar crowd.
The anti-avatar crowd, meanwhile, wants to force their preferences for a text-only userbit (using vBulletin jargon here) onto the avatar supporters. Even though avatar display can be turned off in a user’s control panel, they still want to impose their preferences onto the entire SDMB community. It’s a win-lose scenario.
That being said, how will avatars change the quality of discussion on the site? Does the anti-avatar crowd really think it will devolve from semi-intelligent discussion into a stream of one-line “me too” and “lol” followups? If they’re opposed just because they feel it is distracting, again they can TURN AVATAR DISPLAY OFF. If they want “everyone to share the exact same experience I have”, well, such an attitude seems incredibly self-centered and selfish.
Can anyone answer the question about avatars and strain on the server?
Query times for thread display will be a wee bit longer; like a few thousands-th of a second longer.
Yes, thread load time is longer. With size limits (2K to 3K max), it’s not a burden for most users, except the few that might use 28K dialup.