Welcome to the Dope!
Thanks. I’m curious to see if anything happens soon from all this feedback. Something tells me no.
I don’t know, regime change, Avatars are a no harm, no foul addition. Software is in place and proven. It is an easy thing to try.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with “control freakness”. Add a huge resistance to change around here, and that’s basically it. (You should’ve seen the uproar when we added buttons for Faceboook, Twitter, Google, etc. It was almost as if the sky was falling!!! 
And now? Nobody even notices, I’ll bet)
I don’t remember that reaction to the buttons, I don’t think it was as bad as you say. The Pay to Play was ugly and adding ads was ugly. But can you find the big furor over the buttons?
Might not have been that, it might have been something else I’m thinking of. My point is, this place has a tendency to freak out over any type of change.
Or you could say that some people tend to freak out when they don’t get what they want.
Ox Goring 101.
I’m sure there were some over-reactions. Can’t avoid that on the internet. I feel as though people accepted Private Messages being adding well, but still a few complained.
Yeah, perhaps, but this is literally a feature that impacts users who choose not to use it in no tangible way. It’s like being upset that Ben & Jerry’s adds chocolate to a line up that has vanilla. I wonder what skin other people use that’s different than my forum skin so I can be upset by their non-conformity.
Wow this conversation has brought back memories of the great avatar debates from years ago. Every point in this thread and many others not yet mentioned have already been argued ad naseum hundreds of times back and forth. It boils down to this:
Avatars are an option not a requirement and there is no justifiable reason to argue against enabling the feature here. None. Yet many here still do, all the way up to the very top of board administration, e.g. Ed.
Years ago we wrote a greasemonkey script and server CGI to handle SDMB avatars and despite some comments here it was actually pretty heavily used and enjoyed by dozens, possibly hundreds of posters, and all those who were against avatars for whatever unsupportable reasons were blissfuly unaware of them just as they would be if the board enabled them directly.
I wrote the script that talked to the CGI but another poster, Spinky, was really the brains behind the hard programming. He became disenchanted with the boards for whatever reason and chose not to figure out what had gone wrong when they stopped working a few years ago. I didn’t feel it was my place to push him, don’t have the programming knowledge to do it alone, and the system just quietly died off.
I’m really glad to hear that TPTB are even considering the idea of enabling the built-in avatars and would urge all supporters of the idea not to get into a debate about whether or not they should be opt-in or opt-out, whether animated avatars should be allowed, etc. Just having the option enabled would be a major breakthrough and I’d suggest taking whatever you can get if TPTB are willing to try the idea out.
Well, here are some ways off the top of my head I’ve seen them used that affects other people even if they’re not choosing to participate.
Let’s say, there are a handful of posters that show up with a cute octopus avatar (not the same one) that you just keep noticing are snarking you. It’s now up to you to prove that they have anything to do with a campaign against you. It’s worse if you don’t have avatars on because then it might take you longer to notice you’re the butt of a joke.
Then there’s the avatars that mimic yours.
Then there are the groups that get together to coordinate avatars, creating more of an in-group, leaving others out.
People asking other people why they don’t have an avatar.
People complaining about your avatar.
People making snide jokes about your avatar, or lack thereof.
People telling other people which picture they should use for their avatar.
Some people like that stuff. Others don’t. To the extent that people don’t, there would be disagreements and mods would need to decide what to do.
While it’s personal preference to have avatars visible or not, it’s not always personal preference how it affects you.
As I just mentioned in the previous post, there already were hundreds of active avatar users for several years here, using a third-party script instead of the simple and more elegant built-in board feature. None of that happened. Not once.
Eh. I don’t particularly care for them, so I don’t use them and have them disabled places where that is an option. As long as there is an option to disable, I really don’t care. And I don’t think anyone else should either :).
Make the board some money while you’re at it. Charge $1 extra for Dopers to use avatars. Charge $2 extra to disable them. And for all the posters who think it will be too complicated to change their settings, charge $3 to have a mod go in and click the button that toggles the feature on or off for them.
This sounds like you might overthinking things.
Who cares if people make snide jokes at your avatar? This is an Internet forum, populated by anonymous people.
If some takes a jab at your avatar, and you interpret that as a personal attack against your character and self-worth, you’ve already lost.
This, alone, would pay for years of server time.
Looks like they work!
Thanks for the advice. I can’t wait for the winning.
Nice! By the way, is your username from the group in Neuromancer?
Woo hoo!!
If other posters are out to get your goat, they will find some way to do so, avatars or no.
Again, there are plenty of ways to do this without avatars. In fact, I’ve seen this sort of thing happen on board with avatars, and no one tried to do it with avatars, they did it with words.
“I don’t use them” would seem an adequate answer to a polite question. If the question is rude, you can ignore it or report it.
unless you pick a provocative avatar, these all seem unlikely.