Why don't you make a cool ascii art thing and put it in your sig :D

I agree with those who don't like avatars - I find them unnecessary and often annoying. As far as making it easy to recognise people - there are 1000+ users here (?) I for one don't plan on memorising that many avatars. And isn't that what names are for?

Unusual? A matter of opinion.
Unprofessional? Baloney.
While one can make a case for avatars personalizing their posts (and actually your individual screen name and signature also serve this purpose) the decision to have them does rest with the person responsible for this very well run bulletin board.
Usenet has survived quite some time without avatars. Yikes, I have just made a case for "unprofessional".
:eek:
Perhaps the addition of pop up adds every time a link is clicked would provide the financing needed. Anyone that didn't like them could go to extra trouble to turn them off as Brain Drop suggests with avatars.
:(
I hear pop up ads are considered quite professional.
:D

alright fine, so you all dont want avatars ill let it go. but jeremy does not stick out because he is the only one with an avatar, the brain just picks up on pictures faster. and a picture is worth a thousand words and that goes a long way towards personalization. it just gives you something to identify a person with and have more of a feeling about their character. you know that a person with an avatar of a smiley face drinking a pint over and over is probably an all right guy. but whatever, profesional it is then. aye aye captain.

A thousand words. Words like.. "oh look at me i have a vaguely penguin shaped thing defacating on bill gates." that's a picutre really worth painting isn't it... :rolleyes:

It amazes me how so many people in life see fit to demand things when there is no concievable reason to do so. Obviously i'm using this site as an example.. a site that is, as jeremy said, 100% free. people are always welcome to make suggestions, but demands are generally absurd. This site, as every other (even the nasty tacky ones covered in avatars) have the right to look how they want to. it's Jeremy's perogative to not let this site look like a war zone. Sure it would be possible to make a site like this "skinable" with css or what you will... but keeping this site clean has done wonders for it's reputation as well as it's usage. If this site was covered in tacky flashing logos and such I really doubt that distributions such as Slackware would be using this as an OFFICIAL resource for their sotware.

Personally i don't like l33tness, and most people that have a compulsion to spell with numbers also seem attracted by gimmicks like avatars (you're welcome to think of your own analogy.)

Yeah, that's what text is.

Brain Drop brings up a good point. If you don't want avatars, you should have an option to turn it off. Also, I use a dial-up connection and it don't take THAT long for avatars to load. ...especially if they are, like 60x60 avatars. It is also true that you can also remotely locate avatars and use them (if the forum lets you) and the forum is not billed for the bandwidth. As many times as I hear it is asked, I think it may be time to allow them, even if they are small in size. As for me, all the forums I visit except this one allow avatars and two I frequent allows huge avatars, though if you look there, my avatar is usually within the 60X60 limit that is usually marked. I know we all have our own opinion, and mine includes that having no avatars looks rather unprofessoinal in many cases. On my 56K connection, I have noticed that avatars may take, at the most, five seconds to load, and that's with it loading a bunch of other buttons and stuff at the same time. Though I don't have the money to pay for bandwidth as the site is now, it might cost an extra 50 cents a month for the avatars. If that's a concern to you, let me put an URL in my prefs so that it will retrive the avatar from there? There's more than one way to do avatars and more than reason to do them. If you wanted, you could even limit what you can put as an avatar more than most sites do (IE only stuff that doesn't have a logo unless it's Linux). Though my problem isn't so much avatars, it just seemed then like you just weren't listening to your users.:tisk:

jerimy is listening, and we hear this 'we want to ugly the place up' argument about twice a year. avatars are not going to happen, stop begging.

The notion of remotely-loaded avatars was already addressed. I'm sure you know as well as I do how broken image links can slow a site down, not to mention loading images from overworked servers. I recpect your right to your opinion, but the characterization of "unprofessional" just seems bizarre to me.

The only kind of avatar I wouldn't mind would be if each user were allowed to display the official logo of his/her chosen distro. This would actually serve a useful purpose, and Jeremy could control the size and content of the images easily. Of course, this would open a new can of worms, as people complain that their distro is not represented, or they want logos for all five of their favorites.

But I imagine that's not at all what the people clamoring for avatars have in mind anyway. Personally, I like the site just the way it is -- clean and content-oriented. A good website is about content, and graphics which do not contribute to the focus of that content are superfluous.

To add to the fray...

IMO avatars do not make the site look professional at all and in fact add clutter and noise. Linking to avatar images hosted elsewhere will add to the page load times as well, while broken links will furnish the joint with.. broken link images. Ugly.

LQ is clean and fast. Just the way I like it.

<edit> Damn that Skywatcher is fast...
"The force is stong in that one."

Yeah ok then... after all, one person in each 100 members or so can't be wrong! Ever heard of a silent majority?

I'm curious about why people believe avatars make a site look professional.
All the sites with avatars are visited one or fewer times by me. I see a site
with hundreds of different, usually obscure or ugly images in the margins
and I think, "Ok, there's nothing of import here, just people chatting."

To me, a site with a bunch of images looks neither good nor professional.
Any time I come across a site with a large number of images (unless I'm
looking for images), I hit the back button and look for a different site.
And I have a T1 line at work and a broadband connection at home. It
doesn't matter what the speed of my connection is, I hate wading through
images.

When you are 2 that is correct. However, name association with content oriented replies is MUCH better than image association with the same content. You don't associate an avatar of Homer with the greatest reply ever; however you can associate a name (whether it be a screen-name or actual name) with content (Take anything from Shakespeare for an example; now compare that to associating a picture of sand to a poem. I think you will notice that anything associated with sand will come to mind with the picture, however anything associated with SHAKESPEARE comes to mind when you think his name...) VERY well. Furthermore, you run into multiple people with the same avatar, then, according to you, everyone using that avatar will now be associated with that "style" of response.

No, I don't agree, unless I was confused and most people here are 2 - 5 years old or less...

Cool

I'm actually, this is going to be a surprise, pro-avatar... with some severe constraints. There's this one overclocker's site in the UK that has rank based avatars that looks rather well done. I also like the suggestion about distro based avatars. Each of these compromises knocks out the problems with bandwidth as within a few page loads local browser cache has all of the possible images, which altogether would actually be smaller than the "post", "edit", "www" blah blah blah buttons that are tiny, but nibble away at bandwidth here and there.

Now, here's why I don't ever want to see avatars on LQ.

1. I couldn't post at work, and that's where I get most of my posting done. For nearly two years now I've been posting on LQ without a whisper from my co-workers, then one week I'm posting over at www.wilwheaton.net and next thing I know I've got people nosing in on my terminal. Eventually this will become an "issue", and then I lose my favorite work slackoff pasttime.

2. We are all freeloaders on Jeremy's paycheck. LQ does not run a profit off of banner ads and Donating members and T-shirts, but because, I suspect, Jer spends way too much of his income in floating the bill. He's way too much of a nice guy, and would probably be willing to take a hit like increased bandwidth costs in order to make the user base happier... if it was for something less inconsequential.

Cheers,

Finegan

I don't think most realize, Jeremy is open for suggestions but this is something that most likely will not change ever as he has stated numerous times before his stance on avatars.

I think everyone who is pro-avatar should just let this topic die now, cause no matter how much anyone whines and moans about enabling avatars, its not gonna happen. And the more its dragged out, the more its just going to aggravate members, moderators, etc.