Are you guys noticing that the SDMB seems more cluttered today?
More bad gay marriage analogies:
SDMB: “If you want avatars so badly, there’s plenty of other message boards that have avatars.”
South Carolina: “If y’all want to gay marry, y’all free to pack your bags and move your asses to Taxachusetts or Canada or Commieland or wherever to do it.”
SDMB: “You can always install Greasemonkey, install this script, and add a line in your profile if you want to see avatars.”
South Carolina: “Ain’t nobody stopping y’all from doin’ whatever the hell it is that you do. I just ain’t don’t want to see the state put no rubber stamp on y’alls sinnin’.”
Well, I don’t. Thank you SO MUCH for calling attention to my disability! :mad:
Is there any reason these couldn’t be posted into a new ATMB thread? Seems like it would save a lot of PMing, and let casual avatar enthusiasts try them out.
If you could pm me instructions, I’m trying, and I’m completely stumped. 
How DO I upload to upload it? I use Chrome, if that helps.
I haven’t tried it with Chrome but **Tangent **has it working and sent me these instructions. (scroll down to the section titled: “Install User Scripts Manually”)
It looks really simple. You save the contents of the script I sent you as a plain text file named “Whatever.user.js” where whatever is whatever you want, followed by .user.js
and then just drop that file onto any Chrome window. You should get a dialog asking if you want to install a user script, just click “Install” and it should do the rest.
i don’t know if this has been answered, but if someone who has installed this posts an avatar that another poster using the same program finds objectionable, who handles it?
This particular script finds a URL to the person’s desired profile from their SDMB profile, so in order to put something objectionable out as an avatar they would need to put something objectionable in their public SDMB profile.
My thinking is this would be subject to moderator action. If someone brings objectionable content in a SDMB profile to the attention of a mod it shouldn’t matter how or why they noticed that content (e.g. using a greasemonkey script to show avatars or randomly browsing). And as far as looking at it from the standpoint of a board infraction, if someone puts something objectionable in their profile it shouldn’t matter if their intention was to offend greasemonkey users specifically or just random people who might browse their profiles.
ETA - the script also includes a simple way to ‘block’ any users avatar if desired, or replace it with one of the users own choosing.
Would the monitors have to install the program to properly judge said avatar?
No–they could easily click on the link in the offender’s profile.
Understood.
No they would only need to inspect the contents of a SDMB profile. For example if someone reported “Crazyhorse has an offensive image linked in his profile” they might follow that link to determine if it is indeed objectionable and take whatever action is appropriate, but it wouldn’t matter if it was noticed by someone using an avatar script or just browsing their profile as a regular board user with no add-ons.
Does it really matter?
There really isn’t any ability to control what people want to do outside of the software and on their own computers.
For example: instead of a link for avatars, what if someone hosted the avatars and they were all automatically linked by the SDMB user id? There would be no content on the SDMB that could be controlled by the mods to resolve that problem.
Or another example:
What if the snackpit decided to automatically replace any reference to an SDMB user id with an image of their choice. What could anyone do about that?
Once the content leaves the SDMB and arrives at your browser, you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it’s not illegal).
Hell, I believe you could even point the greasemonkey script to the SDMB people pages.
( flees )
I didn’t mean to offend! Please accept my apologies by copying and pasting this link into your br— shit…
I’ll send beer.
I’m bolding, upsizing, and highlighting this notion in an obnoxious color and font to show my favor and support.
It is a rare honor.
I was trying to keep the script to a limited distribution mainly until we got the OK from ntucker to keep using his CGI, and he and Polerius had a chance to give the code a once over. It was lucky they did because there were two huge improvements made to both the script and the CGI as a result of that quick once over.
Now that the idea of making it an installable link on userscripts.org was brought up I was going to try to do that. Maybe release the code there and have a discussion thread here.
The script was originally getting updated about every hour and trying to maintain a version for general consumption would have been complicated by constant updates, but now it seems pretty stable and just about “version 1.0 ready”. As far as I’m concerned it could be posted as-is for those who want to try it manually while development continues on a one-click install version.
Finally! Thank you, Crazyhorse! (Turns out I was using an outdated version, and that’s why I couldn’t get it to work)
Awesome. Thanks Crazyhorse, ntucker, Polerius and any others who may have had a hand in getting this totally working, easy, fast and serviceable. I’m able to get it working in both FF and Chrome. Haven’t really looked into Safari yet. Not sure if there’s a Greasemonkey workaround there?
Now, if anyone would be up for giving weirdaaron’s ID badge script a boost, and work in tandem with the avatars (as the avatars push the username over and the badges overlay), I’m sure karma would eventually pay you back in some way, as my gratitude is only worth about a cup of coffee and maybe a bagel.
I have been an admin for 10 of those 15 years I spoke of. I own my site, along with two others. The closest we got was a shot of some Star Trek character that showed a lot but mostly nothing (T’Pol), thus didn’t break the rules. Rest assured we’d have smacked them down or, better, like vbulletin allows, just gone in and removed it, with a note not to do that again. It’s not hard, to anyone who uses vbulletin, which this site does.
I have also had admin power over at least three other forums that have since died. I wasn’t their creator so I’m not all broken up about it.
You’re the second person to mention that so I installed weirdaaron’s script and I see the issue. The badges get partially hidden when the SDMB avatar moves the username over. But I can’t think of any better place to put the avatar than where it is. It might be fixable by just having the badges begin 50 pixels to the right of where they do if that is possible. Although then in cases where someone has badges but no avatar there would be a 50 pixel space before the badges appeared.
With a quick look through the script I can see it’s too advanced for me to tinker with. Even if I would presume to do so I would probably break it, and I don’t know a way to make scripts talk to each other if one exists so I’m already out of ideas.
Hopefully once there is a discussion on the Avatar code and installation etc. some GM experts will be able to tackle this.
If we do get avatars around here, I foresee a LOT of Monty Python, Star Wars, and custom SDMB injokes. (I would love to make avatars for people)