“I do not like ketchup, Sam I Retchup.”
How’s that? Yeah, stupid, but what does anyone expect of me?
ETA: You know they make green ketchup, these days. Goes nicely with the green eggs and ham.
Yes, we are pretty stupid. How’d you guess I was going to do that? :(
:eek:
To tell the truth, this argument doesn’t really hold water in any forum. Most people here* won’t even bother to upload an avatar, so those people that want to see them wouldn’t see them anyway.
*or at least many people here
The avatar debates have been around long before GB went online.
Looking at those older threads, people’s opinions have slowly changed through the years, with many who were once opposed to avatars (Guinastasia, for one ;)) now being one of the most vocal proponents. I think people slowly changed their minds when they saw the second-generation spinoff boards implement avatars, and the hypotheticals posed in previous and current debates never emerged.
This really is like the gay marriage debate. Looking at those older threads, people assumed that the SDMB would look like a worst-case scenario teen or gamer board if avatars were enabled. Seeing the message boards with obnoxious avatars and sigs as the norm is almost like someone seeing flamboyant pride parades as the everyday face of the GLBT community.
Many Dopers don’t seem to visit other message boards often, and when they do, it’s likely a search that takes them to a lowest common denominator forum; a place with an obnoxious template, garish animated avatars, long multiple-image signatures, and one-line posts. It’s not the avatars that made those places so awful; it was the founder of the site, its members, and the underlying board culture. As I and others pointed out, there are many intelligent, mature message boards with avatars enabled, and cesspools that have none. Let’s face it; 90% of message boards out there are crap, and it’s the content that makes them so awful, not the avatars or lack thereof.
My opinions about avatars are based on the experiences on the site I run, which has had avatars enabled since 2001. Here’s a typical thread in the off-topic/general discussion area (zombie threads aren’t an issue), and a recent thread in one of the on-topic areas. 10 years with avatars, and no issues. Avatar-centric threads and posts are very rare outside of the help/announcements forum.
That’s exactly the type of avatars I generally encounter, elmwood–fixed size, no animations, etc. I think they’re annoying and distracting but to each is own. (Hell, I actually do have an avatar on one of those sites.) If it’s an option you can change, as it is on all the boards I’ve seen that have 'em, like I said, I can’t see the harm if only to kill off this silly debate.
Huh, elmwood, I had forgotten all about that. Well, minds do change. And at the time, this place was a lot different. (I’m not stating that to mean it was better or worse, just that, well, it was different. Things change – it always happens).
Most places ARE fixed size – the standard is 80x80 to 100x100. And the only places I see animated ones are on Live Journal. And posters have to have so many posts (say, 50 - 100?) to have one.
BTW, I looked up the poll from last time – actually, pro-avatar votes were the majority, 137 to 108, 213 if you count those who those who voted that they wouldn’t mind having avatars if they were turned off. A slim majority, to be sure. But the idea that most people voted not to have them were false. Those who didn’t want them AT ALL, NEVER NEVER were in the minority.
He pointed out how your opinion has evolved, but he neglected to mention how his has evolved: (from the same thread)
Agreed, and I pointed that out myself in one of the threads. The greasemonkey solution where you assign avatars for the posters you want to by selecting the avatars you want does a better job for that functionality.
But that’s a separate issue, even if it has the same result. One is what is the function of avatars, the other is do you care to put up an avatar for yourself. One is the board preventing the use of avatars, the other is the users just not wishing to use a feature.
I could. 
But as you’re apparently an Irishman in Houston, I think you shall appear for now as “The Irishman,” by Houston painter Gary J. Hernandez.
Uhhh … someone hacked into my account, that’s it!
Forgot about that, really. When I made the post, the Web 2.0 school of design – simple, clean but still visually appealing layouts – was still a few years away from becoming the norm. The percentage of Web sites with loud, in-your-face design was much higher back then. IIRC, I feared that if the SDMB implemented avatars, it would be a free-for-all, as seen elsewhere. Also, versions of vBulletin from the day had no way of determining whether an uploaded avatar was animated or not. I tried to keep animated avatars from my site by limiting avatar size to 3K, but a few newbies still managed to upload pesky flashing .gifs. The administrators quickly deleted them.
As I said, with 10 years running a board with strictly controlled avatars, there’s never been any serious problems. A lot has changed on the Web in the past several years.
Could be worse. At least he’s not drinking. And the hat is on his head. 
nm
I hold in my (non-typing) hand a long list of dopers who are just itching to put really annoying avatars up as soon as the mods allow it.
Check the most recent in the ongoing series of giant Avatar threads. Avatars are on for anyone who wants them. The mods weren’t troubled at all, and so far none that I’ve seen have been even mildly annoying,
The short version for anyone who was following this thread but not the newer one: click here for SDMB Avatars.
Thanks, CH!
One thing I have seen a lot of are true avatars (i.e. actual pics of the poster in question), which is otherwise very rare across the interwebs. Thank Og that nobody has uploaded an animated one-yet (those make me reach for my shotgun).
I don’t see any place in my CP to upload one.
Can you provide or link to a brief explanation of how to use this and maybe a screenshot of what it looks like in action?
Right now, it uses your profile pic. If you want a different picture used, put this in the biography section in your profile. SDMB Avatar: (URL of picture) You do need to upload the picture to a photohosting site like Photobucket, Imageshack or such.
What about people who don’t use Chrome or Firefox?