I think it has more to do with the fact that the administrators don’t want people to get ideas of how to screw around with the coding. We used to have animated smilies, but I seem to remember that some people opalcat got a little too clever in making the little bodiless heads jump through hoops, in addition to other coding stuff. Result: no more animated smilies.
Disclaimer: I’m just going by what I remember what seemed to have happened–If I got some part of this SDMB history wrong . . . I don’t care.
Demostylus, I put it to you that your assertion is correct, but for the wrong reason.
AFAIK, this is what happens:
Browser: Please can I have such-and-such a page. Server: Here’s the HTML. Browser: Thanks, OK, here’s lots of guff and tables and whatnot that I’m parsing. Oh, here’s an image:
Do I have it in my cache? I don’t? Oh seeerrrvveeeer, please can I have that biggrin.gif? Server: Sure, here you go. Browser: Thanks. I’ll display it now.
Do I have it in my cache? I do? Great. I’ll display it now.
…etc. ad Lobsang infinitum.
Thus lots of smilies do indeed put extra bandwidth strain on the board, but purely because of the extra HTML tags, not the image being downloaded. Meanwhile, the constant checking of the cache is what crashes/slows down people’s browsers.
Meh. Threads with a very low information content get closed, even in MPSIMS. “Deal with it” would seem to be appropriate advice. Coldfire didn’t even sound particularly snarky about it, to my ears. (I suspect, if he’d really been annoyed, it would have shown … ) Oh, and you lost points for forgetting to call him a Nazi.
Doghouse–no, we never had animated smilies. What we DID have, that somebody screwed up for everybody else, was the Image coding. First, a troll-in-residence used it to post a picture of a naked female centaur, and then somebody else quite innocently started a “post your desktop!” thread (it was one of those “it sounded like a good idea at the time” things), and by the time it got up to over two pages (100+ posts consisting of full-size screen shots of people’s desktops), it was crashing MPSIMS every day, all day, for several days.
So the Admin shut off the function.
Lobsang can be forgiven that first mass smilie post because it’s been a long time since the issue of mass smilies was addressed, and he’s only been here since March. The last time I remember the subject of mass smilies being addressed in-depth in ATMB was probably the summer of 2000. Maybe it should be added to the FAQ.
But IMO it crossed over from “harmless fun” into “selfish bullshit” when Francesca TOLD him:
–and then he went ahead and posted THREE MORE mass smilies posts, all of them spelling out “so there!” People who ignore well-meant good advice and post a big “oh yeah well fuck you” instead are in my opinion selfish bullshitters.
Coldfire’s an officious brat sometimes, but this time I support his efforts to shut down another brat.
Consider this a learning experience, Lobsang–suck it up, and move on.
That was a web page and AFAIR it was a bit of a cheat. A program that did it. Could be wrong though. I’m meant to be checking response times of a SAP server at the mo. as I’m on a course so don’t really have time to find it for you
fantastic work!