Hehehe. No, that’s not good, but I like the proactive moderation bit.
New members and people passing through to say ‘hi’ are always welcome at G’Dope. I might have accidently banned you through your having an IP address in the same range as a spammer’s. That’s pretty rare - in fact you’re the first person that’s told me it’s actually happened to them - but it’s the only possibility I can think of as to why you’d be getting that “banned” screen.
Not at all good PR, and you have my personal apologies. I’ll see if I can track any banned IP ranges back to Hong Kong, and try to fix that up.
I’ve been unbanned. For a while there I felt I was having a Groucho Marx moment - infamous enough to be refused membership of a club I didn’t even know about.
Thank God. I don’t mind avatars per se, but I find it terribly distracting when there are a bunch of animated images jumping around on the screen. I’ve stopped going to a few boards because the avatar use just got too intense.
On the other hand, I think that (non-animated) avatars can serve a useful purpose; they help associate the post with the poster, if that makes sense. On a board this large, I can’t remember everything about everyone. Really, it’s a relatively small percentage of the SDMB members that I can recall specific details about. Avatars give me something more than just a username to connect individual posts to a specific poster. Of course, if avatars get changed often or, worse yet, are selected from a predefined pool of images, this benefit is mostly lost.
No, that’s not good, but I like the proactive moderation bit.