Interesting, I'm not begging or griping, but I bought both the E3 DVD and the PGC shirt (tucked in an extra donation too, check David Eggleton), but never received a title. All well, I suppose I didn't tell them my username, but it was never asked for.
And I do like the new forums, but I admit it's quite a bummer that I lose my ezSupporter ad-blocking functionality on these new ones.
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Originally posted by: Frozen-Solid
The stupidity here comes from people not being able to read. I said "avatars would be nice but are not needed" - I'll take bannerless, popupless forums that are hosted on a site's own over some pointless avatars any day.
These are easily some of the fastest and best looking forums I've ever used. Let's keep it that way.
Yes, we don't want overtly-wasteful BMPs and badly-dithered GIFs scattered about, but come on, griping about tiny avatars (and I know PGC would keep them tiny, they wouldn't even allow graphics in a sig back on ezBoard (where the sigs are universal for all the boards someone posts on, as well as your sig preferences), and went after anyone with an avatar over... 7k, was it? There's a point when it just seems to get too picky, and I know it's not my place to dictate, which I'm not, but my opinion is that it was already getting enforced a little too much, now totally removing avatars? Avatars let people ID others at a glance. A simple graphic mnemonic so you can see, "Oh, there's Windy, there's Rick, there's Kulock", and so on. Yes, people can read, but, especially with the de-emphasized names on the left (they're just hard to see at a glance for some reason), it takes two to four times longer to find it, read it, and click who it is. Avatars can be seen out of the corner of the eye and you know who it is. But the text looks the same at a quick glance no matter who it is, and yes, sometimes it matters who is saying what (especially on the PGC forums, where saying the wrong thing to a moderator can result in an instant ban :/ ). Allowing small avatars would allow people to immediate click who's saying what as they scan down a topic, it's just far easier. It's not just a luxury.
Most forums allow you to restrict the avatar, not only the size, but the file size, so if that's an issue, like it was before, that could hopefully be prevented. Bandwidth for avatars is obviously external, and as for speed of the forums for the users, I don't think it'd make any real impact. The current layout is incredibly graphics-light as it is (to the point of sparse), anyone complaining about their download speeds would be splitting hairs and trying to squeeze life out of a 2,400 baud. I have a 26k dial-up connection (not 56k like most, 26k thanks to the lines out here), I handle far worse during the day, and the old ezBoard threads never gave me much hassle even with the avatars, I'd often open up multiple windows at once, and they'd load pretty swiftly (avatars last, but most browsers don't wait for every image to totally finish downloading before the page is properly rendered).
That's pretty much all I have issues with. I just think avatars are a necessary addition, just restrict the size and file size.
If I had one other qualm, I'd say move the "Planet GameCube" group of forums up to the top so Talkback is frequented more again (I like the news article links that now tell you how many people have replied since), but it looks the forum categories are in alphabetical order, that might be a default you'd have to fight with.
Topic: List of Suggestions (Read 21030 times)
