Signatures used for advertising

[Ea]

Originally Posted by astra

Cannot say that your avatar is that innocent, not that I mind it

At least she's sitting still

Originally Posted by kacir

I use adblock plugin for my Firefox.
When I see an avatar that I really, really dislike, I right-click on it and select "block this image".
...

If you dislike a long text someone has in his sig, and you do not want to disable all signatures, have a look at the software called Privoxy.
...

You can also use UserContent.css mechanism on all browsers that are based on mozilla engine to do very interesting things, including scrubbing out images, advertisment, formatting or other unwanted elements.

Great suggestions - thank you

Originally Posted by montsnmags

A temporary solution someone mentioned was to hit the ESC key, which stops the animations. I'm not sure if this works in all browsers. Obviously it is not necessarily a permanent solution as detailed above, but may be useful for those who find the annoyance intermittent and of variable level (like me - only sometimes, usually when I'm migrainal, do I find some animations aggravating).

The thing about using ESC is that you have to do each time the page is re-freshed, and threads tend often to be multi-page. Looks like adblock in Firefox is the best solution for me. Not that it's a huge problem, I can think of maybe three or four avatars I might like to "switch off".

[Jellby]

In opera you can simply disable animated graphics

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by Ea

...
The thing about using ESC is that you have to do each time the page is re-freshed, and threads tend often to be multi-page.
...

Yes, thus my provisos in regards to it being a "temporarily solution", and "not necessarily a permanent solution", and that it may only "be useful for those who find the annoyance intermittent and of variable level".

Just maximising the options.

Cheers,
Marc

[astra]

AaaaaaaaaaaaaarghHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Look at the size of this one.
Luckily I use FF with Adblock Plus! and can get rid of all the junk.

[Worldwalker]

It's the tragedy of the commons.

With no formal/technical restriction on signature size, the people who use larger and more intrusive marketing .sigs have an edge over the people who follow the social conventions and respect other users. (it's a bit like how when supermarkets don't kick the people with full carts out of the express checkout lines, it's the rule-breakers who gain the advantage over the rule-followers) So more of them do it. Then it becomes an arms race for having the biggest/flashiest/most-totally-annoying graphic .sig.

There really needs to be either a technical limitation on this (some forum software can set a hard limit to the x/y dimensions of .sig images; I don't know if MR's can) or a very hard and fast rule, one giving specific dimensions, not just "overly large" or something, that is enforced -- first by a warning, and then by loss of .sig privileges.

If this goes on ... well, take a look at some of the gaming forums and you'll see our future. They're advertising the size of their e-peens, not their books for sale, but it's the same concept. You'll see three-line posts followed by a dozen or more banners proclaiming the merits of their characters in every MMO they play, their ranking on every ladder, even the music they're currently listening to. A "page" of posts there can be three or four posts, with all the rest being their freaking bloated sigs.

The primary purpose of MobileRead is a place for people to discuss ebooks, not a captive audience to sell them to. Unrestricted advertising .sigs risks leading to a lot of "I agree" posts just to display that .sig, and shifting the focus from discussion to marketing -- something which will, in time, kill the forum. Even if all the oversized .sigs were pictures of puppies, though, the same problem occurs: more scrolling, and more paging, to extract the pearls of content from the sea of .sigs. MR, like any forum, already expends a part of each post's real estate on non-content material: the left column, buttons, dividers, people who quote to excess, whatever. The bigger the .sigs (graphic or otherwise), the worse the content-to-other-stuff ratio becomes. And we're reading for the content; no matter how cute the puppy, or how impressive the e-peen -- or how interesting the book covers -- you only need to see that once. It eats content.

A somewhat more complicated option, and one that again I'm not sure if the MR software supports, would be to allow graphic .sigs only in certain forums -- in this case, specifically the proposed Book Fair forum. That would be the designated MR "bookstore", the place where we go looking for interesting new books to buy, so the major focus would be on book announcements, and discussion would be a secondary (though still valid) purpose, the reverse of the regular forums. We'd want books in .sigs there -- kind of the equivalent of looking at adjacent books on the shelves. (something else that's lethal to my book-buying budget) But in the discussion forums, the focus should be on discussion, not on the products someone has for sale.

I've run forums since the BBS days. I learned the hard way that forum problems are much, much easier to handle when they're small. Deal with a problem when only a few people are doing it -- oversized .sigs, for instance -- and there might be some griping by those few, but it dies down quickly. Wait until a problem has gotten bigger and more entrenched, when the problem behavior has become common and tolerated, and the reaction is much louder, longer, and more intense, and pulls in people who are not directly involved.

MobileRead is getting huge. The bigger a community gets, the less of an effect peer pressure, shared values, and personal connections will have, and the greater the chance of having community members who no sense of community, or no commitment to it. MR isn't a small town anymore; it would be the second-largest city in my home state.

This post is getting all sorts of long and sociological. The executive summary: there really has to be some kind of a hard limit on .sigs before things get out of hand.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by astra

AaaaaaaaaaaaaarghHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Look at the size of this one.
Luckily I use FF with Adblock Plus! and can get rid of all the junk.

That one is way over line IMHO.

After I've turned off 'show signatures' I've become a much happier person (just kidding... mostly )

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

It's the tragedy of the commons.

...

This post is getting all sorts of long and sociological. The executive summary: there really has to be some kind of a hard limit on .sigs before things get out of hand.

But quite interesting - thanks!

[tehKitten]

Hmmmm. I use my sig to advertise my blog. Now I get about one visitor a day instead of none.
But indeed, those large signatures are annoying. On other forums I used to send a sarcastic PM to those users, and the large signatures magically disappeared after that.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by tehKitten

Hmmmm. I use my sig to advertise my blog. Now I get about one visitor a day instead of none.
But indeed, those large signatures are annoying. On other forums I used to send a sarcastic PM to those users, and the large signatures magically disappeared after that.

Personally I would wish it could be done without sarcasm No need to alienate people either way.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by tehKitten

Hmmmm. I use my sig to advertise my blog. Now I get about one visitor a day instead of none.
But indeed, those large signatures are annoying. On other forums I used to send a sarcastic PM to those users, and the large signatures magically disappeared after that.

Your .sig is great. It meets my rule of thumb: it's smaller than your post.

I have seriously seen posts on gaming forums that say something like "Yeah, that really sucks" followed by a whole screen full of gamer banners of various sorts, each of which is nearly the size of the outsized graphic that is an issue right now. So you scroll down past the billboard collage, and get to the next post. It says "I know, right?" followed by another collection of the things in different colors.

I'm reasonably sure that riots would break out here if someone tried that, but the gaming forums didn't get that way overnight, either. First it was graphic .sigs, then one little banner, than another for a different character, until finally you have that nightmare.

Not showing .sigs isn't really an option, because so many people have ones that are worth reading (one even quotes me!). Just keeping the things down to a reasonable size -- personally, I consider my own to be about at the limit -- would be better. If I ran the zoo, I'd limit them to 3 lines of text (blank lines count) and no graphics. But whatever the limits, unless they're reined in now, we're starting the long slide to a forum that looks like the Las Vegas Strip with the actual posts buried under all the signs. This should be totally content-agnostic: it doesn't matter if a .sig has a picture of your new book or your new puppy if it's too damn big. (and no, I don't care how many achievements your blood elf pally has; belfs should be strangled at birth anyway)

[HarryT]

We do strictly control the size of sigs. If you come across one that you think is excessive, please click the "Report Post" button and we'll deal with it.

[neilmarr]

I reckon a simple URL should do the trick. When it's thread-specific (say a thread on DRM, for instance), though, I'm inclined to use a subject-specific signature (ie. as below for DRM). Otherwise, I quite like to see a book cover as an avatar and SIMPLE buying details when a poster is already established as an active MR member, taking an interest in the posts and work of other MobileReaders. But -- then again -- nothing really gets up my nose here. Folks play pretty fair as a rule and balance their advertising with constructive comment in other threads. Cheers. Neil

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by HarryT

We do strictly control the size of sigs. If you come across one that you think is excessive, please click the "Report Post" button and we'll deal with it.

Aside from my visceral dislike of graphic .sigs at all (due to years of aversion therapy in gaming forums), if we have to have them, I think it would save resentment on the part of the reported person, guilty feelings on the part of the reporting person, confusion, ambiguity, and stress all around, not to mention mods' time, if some kind of technical limit could be placed on .sig sizes. That way, nobody has to report anything; oversized .sigs get either rejected or resized, whatever the forum software can handle, and it's totally content-neutral. There's no "who's the @#$& who reported my .sig?" (even if they don't come out and say it), etc. Nobody likes being reported, and few people like reporting people (those who do are their own special problem). Preventing the situation from ever coming up reduces stress all around.

[thinkpad]

Originally Posted by Dusty Bottoms

I'd think there should be an outright ban on images in signatures. They clog up the whole page and are obnoxious.

Amen to that. Lately I've been greeting some of the newcomers and it seems like the perfect spot for *some* to get free promotion. Let us be free of the images in the signatures.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by thinkpadx

Let us be free of the images in the signatures.

I agree.

[Marseille]

I'd think there should be an outright ban on images in signatures.

Originally Posted by thinkpadx

Amen to that. Lately I've been greeting some of the newcomers and it seems like the perfect spot for *some* to get free promotion. Let us be free of the images in the signatures.

I'm all for hard technical limits, but I hope images don't go away entirely. While mostly used for flashy stuff and often abused, images can be a great way to display hard info as well. I'd love to recast my reading list into a live image -- much easier to manage the list that way, far more info can be shared in a more readable and less crowded way than how I share it now.

(several minutes later) Halfway through this post, I've started doing just that using a blog-like tool to make an RSS feed out of my reading list and feedburner to organize it into a fairly unobtrusive image. I feel your pain, but I hope you don't persuade mobileread. I think this will make my sig less annoying.