Vote Tea Party.
I’d previously thought of it as simply an aesthetic preference. Until this thread, I wasn’t aware that not liking avatars was a form of control-freakism borne of Asperger’s syndrome, equivalent to denying women’s suffrage and equal rights for gay people. Now I feel kind of bad, and worry that soon it might be like packing Jews into cattle cars or skeet-shooting puppies.
I just personally find them kind of tacky and distracting, and think enabling them would cheapen the board in a small way—by removing one of the few characteristics that distinguishes it from thousands of other sites in the non-stop garish freakshow that the Web has come to represent.
Yeah, you can turn them off. And if my neighborhood were littered with scattered trash, rusted car-hulks perched on blocks bleeding oil across cracked driveways, shattered crackpipes and used condoms, waist-high crabgrass, and defeated armies of pink plastic flamingos, I could “solve” the problem by wearing a grocery bag on my head.
Get out your bullet, Barn.
If you make it the plastic kind, your problems will surely be solved.
Even then they serve a purpose: Avatars are extremely helpful even within a single-thread. It makes it infinitely easier to keep track of who’s saying what.
That’s actually not the same at all.
If only they would allow us to use a unique series of letters and/or numbers to identify ourselves. It could be placed at the top left-hand corner of each post, maybe enlarged and in a different color to make it stand out, but it would be in the same box as the message itself so that there would be no mistaking who wrote what.
If only those were easy to remember…you know, like a picture.
What’s wrong with sniffing each other’s butts to establish identity? It also gives a general status update as to diet, health, and other activity.
Well, until spiteful avatar impersonators start using and downloading their enemies’ avatars.
And how would you propose ensuring that no two pictures were alike?
It seems to be an analogous phenomenon to 2 women wearing the same dress to a party. Yes, it does happen at times, but it is generally seen as something to be avoided if at all possible.
You can’t, just as you can’t prevent similar usernames or sigs.
And there’s the rub-We have a program that prevents you from using another poster’s name, but no such program is in place to prevent you from using another poster’s picture, and even if I trusted each and every poster here not to do such a thing it would be damn near impossible to avoid this dilemma unless a constantly updated bank of all pictures used so far were available to one and all.
Really? I could register as Red Barshetta, and you think the mods would allow it?
I think it behooves anyone who frequently reads a board to know the rules, standards, etc, and should thus know about the options of turning on and off sigs, avatars and such. And if you are required to occasionally do a bit of research to find out “wtf is going on,” wouldn’t that be preferable to denying a whole set of people the fun of avatars?
FWIW, I would turn off avatars.
Oh, VT, normally I think you’re awesome, but dude. Worst. analogy. ever.
Near impossible? Like hyperbole much?
It’s near impossible to prevent this hypothetical situation, yes. It’s also near impossible it’ll actually happen. There are a lot of images out there–significantly more than there are posters.
Perhaps not that specific example, but there are already several usernames who are similar enough that it confuses me, such as the Quasimodem and some other username that’s quite close (which I can’t recall offhand).
And there’s still the “problem” of identical sigs…
I am going to assume that the people who are deeply concerned about similar/identical avatars have never gone to any other message board, or Facebook, where people use avatars or profile pictures all the time and this is really not a major problem.
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Quasimodal**