There is a limit on searches. You can only do one every 30 seconds. I doubt that even banning searches altogether would give us enough bandwidth to allow everyone to have an avatar and/or banner, though. Sometimes, these boards get so busy that hardly anyone can get through, and that’s WITHOUT technical difficulties or fancy graphics.
I’d rather have the boards be monochromatic and entirely text-based than have them be so slow that it takes a half-hour of trying just to connect. Besides, I have yet to see a avatar or banner that’s helped to fight ignorance.
I think this was worth repeating as well. I wish I had a nickel for every newbie who does this.
I suggest that you try experiencing something that isn’t exactly the way YOU want it. You might find it enriching. Not everything has to be candy-coated.
Because the “substance” is what really matters on the Net. Just because you turn off viewing avatars and banners doesn’t mean that the other 90% of the people who don’t have it turned off aren’t sucking down bandwidth like cheap scotch and thrashing the hell out of the database. And things are slow enough as they are now - I couldn’t connect to this Board from 9:00am to about 2:00pm yesterday at all - there’s no point in having pretty My Little Pony or Suburban Marxist avatars if people can’t see them.
Part 2 is the substance of intellectual property protection, which means that allowing avatars and banners and all sorts of cutsy images means that every Moderator here has to look at ever avatar and determine if it falls under Fair Use. And then they have to respond to the angry and indignant mails from the original artists and their lawyers who protest the use of the avatars. And then they have to ignore the angry and indignant e-mails from fanbois and fangrrls from the cutsy boards who say “Yo! Bitch can’t be usin’ MY avatar!” Why does the SDMB care about this more than other sites? Because they are a corporate site, and because they care very much about IP protection. You would care about it too if you took the responsibility to run your own site, and got letters from lawyers and dumbasses.
Part 3 is that even if the artwork falls completely within public domain and/or is original, now then every Moderator has to look at every avatar and graphic and see “Is this offensive? Is this sexually explicit? Do we want to show people this?” Knowing some of the creeps that we have had here in the past (and have now), I predict within 1.5 minutes of turning on user uploadable avatars, someone will upload one of Hitler pissing on the Koran while beating a kitten, and then we get into Fun Time for the Staff.
We allowed images in the past. They don’t actually take bandwidth or server time, because they are just a simple remote link. However, people ended up linking to all sorts of offensive, hideous, and extreme shit - which was a reflection of their inner soul, I guess. I thought that we should have simply had a permanent insta-ban for image offenses, and left them on, but that’s only IMHO. Maybe if we had no-warning permanent insta-bans for misuse of images in any way, it would clear up the site somewhat so other people could get on the Board more.
I’m not trying to talk down to you, just stating with specific examples that fact that you visit other boards where none of these factors are problems, or recognized as problems, does not change the facts here. Work within the system to express your creativity. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s nothing that says you can’t make your own site and own board just like you want it to be.
Heh. Hehehehehe…you know, I LIKE this. It would certainly clear out some of the terminally stupid and/or offensive posters. I wonder if Ed would go for it?
I like monochrome, anyway. So much more stylish than a lot of the nonsense on the net. Not only that, but it’s reasonably safe to browse at work, being a neutral-looking page. Whereas if it was full of flashing banners and huge graphics files, people would be looking over my shoulder sharpish.
On my bulletin board, I allow avatars (80 x 80 pixels, under 3K, non-animated), and attachments of small, unamimated images. There’s a reason why, though; it’s an urban planning-related site, and sometimes we need to show examples of good or bad development somewhere, or an image of a project a user is working on.
Then again, I’ve only got about 700 members and 100,000 posts. If Cyburbia ever approached SDMB-type user levels and traffic, the avatars would go bye-bye, and image attachments would hit the dust; it’s the IMG tag or nothing.
On the SDMB, it’s substance over style. I like it that way. Please, no k-rad KeWl anime avatars with gamerZZZ-style dark green text on a black background that PWnssS!!!1!!! 420 2600 69 420 2600 69 420 2600 69!!! … uhh … sorry. Got carried away.
I know you have. They’ve been served up by machines that aren’t running on the ragged edge of disaster.
Hopefully, such a day never comes to pass. People come here for the text, not the images, and even if our servers were like unto the Blades of the Sun (fast and sharp, not to mention being a helluva pun) I’d still be against it.
Where else can you go to immerse yourself in pure text-based intelligence? Where else can text-based browsers, often used by the blind in conjucntion with text-to-speech systems and those using obsolete hardware, allow one to join in, instead of confining you to a ghetto?
I hear that! Along those lines, we need to lose the font, color, size, and symbol tags, and add the tt, big, and small tags. We also need to replace b, i, and u with em and strong. Instead of line breaks, we should use paragraphs, and instead of quotes, the q tag. The quote feature we have should produce a blockquote instead of a div and a table. We should also support semantic tags like abbr, address, and cite.
