Except of course the only ones who will be annoyed are the ones that chose to be annoyed because…oh you know why.
Avatars are painfully dorky. I’m a nay unless I can turn off seeing them. Which may be mentioned upthread, but I’m not going to wade though four pages to find out.
I want:
:smack:
Just to remind you: this is a message board where the most popular threads are abuout Lord of the Rings; where the userbase is very enthusiastic about renaissance festivals, fantasy, and science fiction; and people play collectible card games at real-life gatherings of other forum members.
In 1963, all music will be made from rocks.
Another invalid argument. The membership of your board is highly selective because it’s self-selected by “professionals in a niche field”. The SDMB is a general interest board, appealing to a much more varied audience.
Neither I nor anyone else said that. Also, I said, “in a way”. I thought that made it obvious I was speaking generally.
Earlier in the thread someone said avatars would help them distinguish between posters in a thread. So your last sentence is exactly the point I was making. Seems like visual thinking leaves a bit to be desired.
In a way you are wrong.
ETA: about that particular point. I won’t say you are wrong in your believe about avatars. I just don’t agree with that opinion.
Sorry to be so late to the party, but I vote a resounding “NO” on the avatar issue.
I’m thinking of this more as arguing about the permanence of the hula hoop.
I strongly disagree. A clean, text-only design is not ‘old’ - it’s superior. That is, on a board in which the value and content reside in the content of the messages, which this one does.
When I read a thread on the Straight Dope, I tend to read it as a series of paragraphs in a long essay. I don’t want each paragraph break broken up with cute pictures and sigs and such. It’s visually distracting.
Plus, in my experience with boards that have avatars, there’s always a certain percentage of the conversation that gets sidelined into a discussion of a person’s avatar. That’s doubly annoying if you have them turned off, because you don’t know what people are talking about.
To be honest, I’d rather have embedded pictures and youtube videos than avatars - at least in the less serious forums like IMHO or the Pit.
I wouldn’t leave, but if I found the experience of reading threads less enjoyable, my usage would gradually decline. Maybe I’d get used to them and stop caring, but right now it would annoy me.
Does VBulletin have the option of turning these features on an off on a forum-by-forum basis? If so, I’d recommend that the ‘social’ forums like Cafe Society and IMHO could have them, but the more serious forum like Great Debates and General Questions could have them turned off.
I wouldn’t even mind a forum that had pictures and video linking turned on. For discussions where you are actually referencing an image or a video, it’s very convenient - so long as poeple don’t abuse it by doing stupid things like embedding a picture of their dog or their car in every post.
But keep Great Debates and General questions free of noise, please. I no more want avatars there than I want cute pictures starting every paragraph of a novel.
As for the people who accuse us naysayers of being locked in the 50’s or something… Anyone remember what the web was like when people first learned HTML? Patterned backgrounds, spinning, flaming logos, five different colors of fonts on the same page… Why? Because it was new, and it was high-tech, and because you could do it easily. So everyone did it. If you said that a web page should be clean and the design entirely focused on highlighting the content, you could be accused of being an old stick-in-the-mud.
But good design is timeless. The better web designers have learned that anything that distracts from the content had better have a damned good reason for being there. Flash for the sake of flash is bad.
Avatars aren’t always bad. On sites that focus on the social networking aspects of the internet, Avatars ARE the content. They represent the people, and the people are what matter.
This board is supposed to be about ideas. When I read a post, I honestly don’t care who wrote it. I read for content. In fact, I mentally filter out the poster names altogether most of the time, and it’s only when I want to reply that I stop and look at who wrote what I just read. For someone like me, having avatars in the mix is like having a kid in my peripheral vision jumping up and down going, “Look at me! Look at me!” while I’m reading a book. Distracting and annoying.
Perhaps that’s where the split is coming from. The people who come to the SDMB to meet friends and chat with them would like avatars. The people who come here for debate and to share knowledge see them as a useless distraction. So if we could put them in the social forums and leave them out of the others, that would be fine with me. It would also be an interesting experience to see how the users perceive them after a while of being exposed to both interfaces. Maybe they’ll all want them, or maybe even more will hate them.
I also think the avatars will tend to attract more people who are interested in social networking, and fewer people who are interested in serious debating/ignorance fighting. I’d hate to see this place become yet another site where people tell each other in jokes and chat about their friends all the time.
Having avatars is such a terrible idea. Please no avatars.
Well, the only argument I’ve seen so far that seems at all valid to me is those who say they are visual and need the avatar to associate a user with a post. Yet that post is in words. Perhaps the slippery slope will lead to us posting in rebus.
Ah, the bimonthly avatar debate. I still register my vote as no, and would consider it a great personal favour if you would please do me the kindness of removing yourself from my lawn at your earliest convenience.
It would be nice if an administrator would drop by with a definite answer to the copyright issue with regards to avatars. This whole debate could be mooted with a single post.
N + (**H ** + O) + U
The majority of what I have on my screen is directly work-related. I’m careful about things that aren’t, because customers in parts of the store can see my screen. There is, in fact, a message board that I use which has avatars, but it’s a professional forum, and most of the avatars are bookstore logos or pictures of bookstores.
I often reference sites like Fantastic Fiction, Wikipedia, and Bookfinder. When people ask about books in the media, I’ll check newspaper, radio, and TV Web sites. I frequently use government sites as well.
I have no idea whether that tells you anything useful, but I hope it answers your question.
Does this mean a rule that two people couldn’t have the same or very similar avatars? Who gets precedence when two people fight over the rights of having a Gilligan avatar? And what happens if I create an avatar that breaks US law? E.g. one day when the message board is especially busy I change my avatar to have a background of red flames with text saying “SDMB IS ON FIRE!”
Isn’t there an obvious answer to this question? You break the rules, you get talked to/warned/banned I would imagine, whether it’s an avatar, sig, homepage, etc.
Well, now we’re getting into my moderator perspective, for which those are all very good questions, and to which my response is, “No way in hell do I want to deal with that!”
And, as a side note, I (as a mod) would not be able to turn off avatars, any more than I can turn off sigs or put someone on my ignore list. As a mod, I don’t want them.
I think everyone waxing lyrical about the supposed superiority of the SDMB has not been exploring the net very well. There are a plethora of forums devoted to talk just as intelligent as the discussions here. This messageboard just happens to be general interest while others tend to be topic based. However, there is plenty of extraneous fluff here. That’s ok. Avatars are just more fluff. They’re fluff that can be avoided via user control panel. Just like MPSIMS fluff can be avoided by not going into MPSIMS. Sometimes it seems like the reason people oppose avatars is simply because they know others like them. Anyway, I think whoever mentioned the business aspect of the SD has it right. If TPTB determine avatars will bring in more revenue (assuming the free posting with ads ever gets off the ground) then there will be avatars regardless of the general opinion of the community.