Water12356
03-23-2006, 11:38 PM
Copied and pasted Joe's first post in the old thread. Nobody can say it better.
(Edited due to Joe not using infopop anymore and new size rules for avatars.)
"Here are the avatar rules on this board. There's also some theories on why I don't allow sig images, too.
(The commentary on the rules was originally posted on another board where I copied my original rules over there)
1. For external avatars, only JPG, GIF, or PNG will be allowed. No .bmp files, and especially no .swf files.
2. No animated avatars.
3. No use of the 3D Realms, Remedy, or other associated company logos in your avatar without permission.
4. No usage of pics of the 3DR/Remedy Staff in your avatar image.
5. The size limit on avatars is 100 by 125 pixels (100 wide by 125 high) or 24.4 KB. The software will force you to use that size, so don't try using a bigger image, it will look silly.
6. No objectionable content in avatar images. We reserve the right to define what content is, and deny you the ability to use avatars if you show disregard for the avatar rules.
7. If you are not using one of the built-in avatars, please don't duplicate someone else's avatar - especially if they made it themselves. Try not to rip off other people's avatar work.
If someone posts an offending avatar, I remove it, and email them and tell them why. I have three pre-fab responses ready for that which I can dump into an email program. One for "broken image", one for "you can't use our company logo in your avatar" and one for "no animating".
The reason I don't allow animating avatars is that it quickly becomes a wasteland of "Hey, look at my avatar" instead of bothering with actual messages of substance, and unchecked, will trash the board very quickly. It's the same reason I don't allow images in signatures, because it becomes a wasteland for pEoPlE wHo tHinK it'S C00l and 7eet To TyPe ThIs WaY. People like that tend to be the type who won't pay attention to rules anyway, and just want to draw attention to themselves instead of fostering any kind of community you might be trying to build. Sorry, don't need that kind of garbage on my forums - so images in sigs are out, and the rules I quoted above for avatar usage.
Some more remarks on the rules:
1) Some people think .bmp is a valid inline image format. While IE will display it, that's the singular worst file format one could use - the stupid things are massive, even at avatar sized images. Also, .swf should be obvious as to why I disallow that. There's other things like the .txt trick to get free sites like Geocities to allow offsite image linking, but I've disallowed .txt as an image format in fairness to Geocities' rules.
2) See remarks above about animating images.
3) I don't allow folks to use our corporate logos in avatars - the reason is that I have all of our employees flagged with the company logo underneath their user name, so when you're scanning down a list of msgs, and you see the 3D Realms logo, you can see it's from one of us. For those of us who don't use the 3DR logo, I wouldn't want fans using the 3DR logo and having people think they're from 3D Realms.
4) Objectionable generally constitutes porn, but there's any number of things that would be removed - swastikas, hate images, other insensitive things.
5) I've had a few users swipe other's custom avatars that they made on their own. While not exactly WRONG, it's generally a tacky thing to do.
Also I remove broken image avatars, because some browsers (mostly older Netscape) don't display the page right until it can figure out what to do with every image on the page.
I read every new msg on my board anyway every day, so if there's an offender, I'll see it (but I'm always up for the "Report a Post" use of things like this). Plus I have a pretty good core group of users who will email me about board problems anyway, so if it's really bad (I've had a few people posting sex images in avatars), I get notified before I might see it myself "making my rounds".
So far all this has worked for me. When I get violations, I send 'em an email (or a private message) as noted above, and a link to a thread on my board which has these rules (and about 15 more pages of avatar test messages). To date, I don't think I've had a user who has refused and put the same offending avatar back. If they did, they'd get a warning, and a third time would result in a stiffer penalty, like removal of avatar privledges or something else depending on how they refused to comply.
Hope all this was helpful.
(And no, I still won't allow images in sigs, as they tend to be more of a problem than avatars are. I've been asked if I'd come up with similar style rules for image sigs, but I've decided against that, as they are more problematic than avatars are.)"
(Edited due to Joe not using infopop anymore and new size rules for avatars.)
"Here are the avatar rules on this board. There's also some theories on why I don't allow sig images, too.
(The commentary on the rules was originally posted on another board where I copied my original rules over there)
1. For external avatars, only JPG, GIF, or PNG will be allowed. No .bmp files, and especially no .swf files.
2. No animated avatars.
3. No use of the 3D Realms, Remedy, or other associated company logos in your avatar without permission.
4. No usage of pics of the 3DR/Remedy Staff in your avatar image.
5. The size limit on avatars is 100 by 125 pixels (100 wide by 125 high) or 24.4 KB. The software will force you to use that size, so don't try using a bigger image, it will look silly.
6. No objectionable content in avatar images. We reserve the right to define what content is, and deny you the ability to use avatars if you show disregard for the avatar rules.
7. If you are not using one of the built-in avatars, please don't duplicate someone else's avatar - especially if they made it themselves. Try not to rip off other people's avatar work.
If someone posts an offending avatar, I remove it, and email them and tell them why. I have three pre-fab responses ready for that which I can dump into an email program. One for "broken image", one for "you can't use our company logo in your avatar" and one for "no animating".
The reason I don't allow animating avatars is that it quickly becomes a wasteland of "Hey, look at my avatar" instead of bothering with actual messages of substance, and unchecked, will trash the board very quickly. It's the same reason I don't allow images in signatures, because it becomes a wasteland for pEoPlE wHo tHinK it'S C00l and 7eet To TyPe ThIs WaY. People like that tend to be the type who won't pay attention to rules anyway, and just want to draw attention to themselves instead of fostering any kind of community you might be trying to build. Sorry, don't need that kind of garbage on my forums - so images in sigs are out, and the rules I quoted above for avatar usage.
Some more remarks on the rules:
1) Some people think .bmp is a valid inline image format. While IE will display it, that's the singular worst file format one could use - the stupid things are massive, even at avatar sized images. Also, .swf should be obvious as to why I disallow that. There's other things like the .txt trick to get free sites like Geocities to allow offsite image linking, but I've disallowed .txt as an image format in fairness to Geocities' rules.
2) See remarks above about animating images.
3) I don't allow folks to use our corporate logos in avatars - the reason is that I have all of our employees flagged with the company logo underneath their user name, so when you're scanning down a list of msgs, and you see the 3D Realms logo, you can see it's from one of us. For those of us who don't use the 3DR logo, I wouldn't want fans using the 3DR logo and having people think they're from 3D Realms.
4) Objectionable generally constitutes porn, but there's any number of things that would be removed - swastikas, hate images, other insensitive things.
5) I've had a few users swipe other's custom avatars that they made on their own. While not exactly WRONG, it's generally a tacky thing to do.
Also I remove broken image avatars, because some browsers (mostly older Netscape) don't display the page right until it can figure out what to do with every image on the page.
I read every new msg on my board anyway every day, so if there's an offender, I'll see it (but I'm always up for the "Report a Post" use of things like this). Plus I have a pretty good core group of users who will email me about board problems anyway, so if it's really bad (I've had a few people posting sex images in avatars), I get notified before I might see it myself "making my rounds".
So far all this has worked for me. When I get violations, I send 'em an email (or a private message) as noted above, and a link to a thread on my board which has these rules (and about 15 more pages of avatar test messages). To date, I don't think I've had a user who has refused and put the same offending avatar back. If they did, they'd get a warning, and a third time would result in a stiffer penalty, like removal of avatar privledges or something else depending on how they refused to comply.
Hope all this was helpful.
(And no, I still won't allow images in sigs, as they tend to be more of a problem than avatars are. I've been asked if I'd come up with similar style rules for image sigs, but I've decided against that, as they are more problematic than avatars are.)"