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#112: Allow separate avatars for each post

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New FeatureWon't Fix

Greetings! I am here for yet another feature request and today I'd like to talk about mood avatars. Why are they great? It is a select down of possible avatars based on any mood you'd like to display for any post. You can upload them (this would tie into my files storage space) and title them whatever you'd like.

For example of a custom list I could make:
Default - When one is not selected.

404

??

Mandark Laugh

Mandark Bored


This could be useful for forum events, silly threads, or whatever you'd like to show off a current mood or avatar that shows off the mood of the post.

You'd also be able to show off a list of avatars a user uses by clicking a link in their profile. This at the very least is useful for moderators if one (or all) need nuked which may change what Nuke Avatar does in the QP menu (nukes current mood avatar/changes it to default).

Just an idea I hope that one may like.
I'm really not sure how I feel about this. It seems so random and the work required to implement it is unnecessarily large compared to the advantages we'd gain from it.

Are there any other people who think this would be a good idea?
This is a really creative idea, and it's clear you're thinking in terms of technical feasibility too. Still, I'm not sure how well off it would be as a feature on SMWC.

To me, avatars are something we recognize people by, not emoticons enhancing a post. (Random avatar galleries exist, but they're, well, random, and they usually share a style so you still know at a glance who's posting.)

Also, feature creep is a real thing. #tb{''}


 
It kinda sounds like a good idea, but I agree with WYE on this for me. An avatar helps to quickly identify whose post it is. Besides, if you want to show some emotions in a post, we have emoticons #tb{:)}#tb{:p}#tb{XD}#tb{:[)]}
This is the exact same idea as seen on a couple of Acmlm's Board offshoots, most notably "Jul". Mood Avatars are fun, but highly situational. The idea behind them was that there was a set dropdown of "Moods" that you would upload avatars for, being unable to create your own "Moods". So people back then would try and find a set of avatars that were all of the same basic thing that had different mood variations that they could use to fit all of those Moods that were available. It was popular to try and make sets from, say, a single anime or other show since you could then have a theme to your Mood Avatar set and just have the same character doing multiple moods whenever you wanted them for posts. Importantly, on Jul the way it worked was that you linked to a folder somewhere online (at the time I did them, places like Photobucket) and had all the images named certain things and the forum parsed the link and picture names to put the right moods in the right parts of the radio button menu.

So with the background out of the way, are they a good fit here? Well... I'm not sure. They're fun to have but stuff like avatar-user recognition is definitely something that exists. I know I definitely use avatars to see who's posting more often than I use usernames. It wasn't a problem on Jul because the userbase there was rather small and I got to know people by their layouts and username colors in addition to their mood avatar sets. But here, we have so many users it could be a little more confusing.

They work best when a user takes the time to coordinate them like most of the random avatar galleries we've seen users use here like WYE mentioned. But there's no real way to enforce that. I think in the end that I'm against the idea because while it's fun, it seems highly unnecessary for the site. It's a truly vanity feature here and while those can be neat, I don't think this is the right one for us.
I have to agree with FPzero on this one. While it's a clever idea, it just feels too unusual of a feature to have.

Originally posted by Tahixham
Besides, if you want to show some emotions in a post, we have emoticons #tb{:)}#tb{:p}#tb{XD}#tb{:[)]}

I'm one to use emoticons and emoji quite frequently. They're fun to use. I feel like having a changing avatar to show your emotion would kinda defeat the purpose of all these: #tb{''}#tb{^V^}#tb{O_O}#tb{:?}

The only time I really even use a changing "avatar" for emotion is in the PMD forum game. Using a picture from a file bin in your post is probably the closest thing to the feature you're mentioning here.
Twitter
I was not entirely sure what the results would be but possibly the case of not many users really needing this. And it'd take some work for sure.


Now instead, could there be someway to tie CSS to it? Have the avatar div or the img be like ID'ed by post (either id or a custom class)? That would require minimal work, but if someone did want, they could make CSS that'd be able to change it on a post basis on a particular post.

Sort of an API-like idea, but if there then was like something that would allow the post to grab a post's current ID, perhaps one could do something like:
Avatar


Code
<div class="avatar">
<img class="post_avatar_u_2025 post_avatar_p_998877" src="{default_src}" alt="Avatar">
</div>




post_avatar_u_2025 being the base class (post_avatar_u_{userid}) and post_avatar_998877 being specific generated class. And something like [postid] turns into 998877 or whatever post ID it is.

Not saying this feature is anywhere needed, but it'd make some Forum Games interesting. (Excuse the CSS example if you look at this post, it could be done way better [4 AM].)
I have no problem with this being put on indefinite ice or never happening. Just some thoughts. But I do like the idea of some more customization/API. Even if it might make nuking avatars... trickier. But if a user abuses it, they can just be HTML banned or something.
Originally posted by Scrydan
Even if it might make nuking avatars... trickier. But if a user abuses it, they can just be HTML banned or something.

Right now, HTML bans do not exist. Besides, layout rule 8 bans any layouts which affect the page outside of the post - I'd imagine the same applies to any HTML in posts.
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Huh, didn't know that about HTML bans. Guess that happened years ago in the renovation process.

And yeah, I forgot that one CSS idea would sort of go against that rule/confuse people. I mean essentially the less hacky version is just to manually enter an avatar to replace the default, but we run back into the "why we'd need it" in the first place to do such a somewhat huge change.

While I love the idea of something more than random avatars from an external PHP script, it seems unlikely to happen or be really needed.

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