Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple_R
However, there's already a handy-dandy method for dealing with that - The recently added ability to block individual avatars/sigs. Most gif avatars that I find distracting to a bothersome degree are ones that I've already set to block. If a few more end up like that due to an avatar/sig Kb size increase, then I'll just block a few more. This is something that all AS members can now do, of course.
|
Well a few things:
The block avatar feature is a useful trick/hack, but it's not to the point yet where I can really recommend it as a rationale for increasing the bandwidth requirements globally. It requires you to go into your settings, figure out someone's UserID (a.k.a. User Number), and so on. If you want to restore someone's avatar, you have to sort through the comma-separated list and figure out what number to remove... It's really a feature for Advanced Users only designed for specific situations (edge cases), not really meant as an all-purpose tool someone would use regularly (and it's also only for registered users, not our many guests). The increased bandwidth of the size change would be imposed on everyone, and I'm not sure saying "oh just block the bad ones" is a good rationale. Maybe we could improve the feature to be more comprehensive and easier to use (and thus more accessible to the masses), but I don't think we would consider doing that until at least we upgrade to the new vBulletin.
Besides, let's say you're on a mobile browser and have limited bandwidth and notice a large avatar. By that point you've already downloaded it and it's in your cache, and it would probably take more bandwidth to navigate to the options to disable it than it would to just ignore it at that point. And, in addition, it's not always that easy to notice large-sized files anyway; if it were just large animations that'd be one thing, but I'm sure I could make what seems like a really simple animation fill up the entire 100KB quota just by adding color depth and not doing proper noise/gradient cleaning.
This blocking solution also doesn't deal with the concept of multiple environments. So, for example, if I'm on my computer at home, I may be okay with viewing all the avatars, but on my bandwidth-constrained cell phone I may want to turn it off. Until we upgrade to the new version and can implement a mobile skin (perhaps a "low-bandwidth" version of the skin with avatars/signatures turned off but can still work as a posting interface), the per-user block still doesn't really seem like what I'd want as a solution. I could probably implement something on my end to impose the policy the way I want it (for example, disable images in my browser settings or something), but again that's imposing a change on a large group of people and saying that individuals who don't like it can bypass it manually. And this just so that people can have slightly less-choppy animated GIFs?
(Also, it's useless to me as an Mod/Admin anyway because I need to see everyone's avatars/signatures to ensure they're not breaking any rules. Granted, that's not a problem most people have.)
So yeah... still not sold, I guess. Like I said before, I'm not so dead-set against it, and a moderate increase would probably be okay, but I'm not so sure that it's
all that beneficial. Again, only my own opinion.