Avatars?

[head zoo keeper]

Any chance you'll turn on the avatars feature? Just thought it might be fun.

Thanks, CE!

[nelsonfoto]

Playing wait and see for now.

[Peter Evans]

If avatars mean what I think they mean -- an image to go under the poster's name -- they can be mildly amusing and even assist skim-reading, but they add a lot of "weight" (kilobytes). Since I'll sometimes want to access via modem, I'd vote against them.

[Tom Hildreth]

Personal opinion: They are a nuisance, a distracting nuisance when animated. But, on the other hand, I do have this old 8mm movie sequence I shot that might make a dynamite avatar........H'mmm.

[head zoo keeper]

Yeah, I'm on dial-up at home, too, and avatars can bog-down the page load on large threads. Usually the files are very small but because the forum has to grab the avatar image file from wherever on the internet the image is stored -- and every avatar is in a different place -- it can cause delays while the forum software is waiting for the other web servers to send the over the file.

That being said, what's great about these forums is the people and personalities involved. Avatars, by their nature, are supposed to represent a little slice of the user's personality and in this cyber-world, I think it's a nice, tangible almost, connection. It's easier to recognize your forum-friends by their avatar then their user name.

[nelsonfoto]

I might eventually allow a very small avatar via a database I will store internally. I have no desire to hang up bandwidth waiting for offsite servers to feed me their files.