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Text signatures, one or two lines high, tops.  No images.

60 (15.3%)

Text signatures, 3-6 lines tall.  No images.

100 (25.5%)

Text signatures, 7-15 lines tall.  No images.

19 (4.8%)

Unrestricted text signatures.  No images.

15 (3.8%)

Text signatures, one or two lines high, tops.  Cap image height at ~60 pixels.

13 (3.3%)

Text signatures, 3-6 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~60 pixels.

67 (17.1%)

Text signatures, 7-15 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~60 pixels.

9 (2.3%)

Unrestricted text signatures.  Cap image height at ~60 pixels.

3 (0.8%)

Text signatures, one or two lines high, tops.  Cap image height at ~100 pixels.

3 (0.8%)

Text signatures, 3-6 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~100 pixels.

49 (12.5%)

Text signatures, 7-15 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~100 pixels.

18 (4.6%)

Unrestricted text signatures.  Cap image height at ~100 pixels.

3 (0.8%)

Text signatures, one or two lines high, tops.  Cap image height at ~150 pixels.

0 (0%)

Text signatures, 3-6 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~150 pixels.

7 (1.8%)

Text signatures, 7-15 lines tall.  Cap image height at ~150 pixels.

4 (1%)

Unrestricted text signatures.  Cap image height at ~150 pixels.

8 (2%)

Text signatures, one or two lines high, tops.  Images as big as the sky.

1 (0.3%)

Text signatures, 3-6 lines tall.  Images as big as the sky.

0 (0%)

Text signatures, 7-15 lines tall.  Images as big as the sky.

0 (0%)

Unrestricted text signatures.  Images as big as the sky.

13 (3.3%)

Total Members Voted: 392

[MaxVance]

Most of the people who didn't want signature images said so before Janus announced his mod for stripping them. You are making this out as a far bigger problem than it really is. It is possible to go completly without seeing signature images, anyway. Just go to the forum index, log in there, then check the box in your preferences to disable them and you never have to see them again. You don't even have to view any posts to do this.

Oh, and I love how you removed my name when quoting my post, to pretend as if I don't exist. Real scathing insult there.

[Aquillion]

Most of the people who didn't want signature images said so before Janus announced his mod for stripping them. You are making this out as a far bigger problem than it really is. It is possible to go completly without seeing signature images, anyway. Just go to the forum index, log in there, then check the box in your preferences to disable them and you never have to see them again. You don't even have to view any posts to do this.

Oh, and I love how you removed my name when quoting my post, to pretend as if I don't exist. Real scathing insult there.

Sorry about that.  I was writing my post at the same time as you were posting that, and only saw your reply when I went to hit 'post' and it did the usual "2 messages have been posted!" thing.  So I just cut-and-pasted your quote in and slapped quote tags around it, since you were talking about the same thing I was posting and it warranted a reply.

And the overall shape of the poll hasn't changed since that announcement was made.  Fundamentally, even if you have the option to log in and disable them, I think that enabling image signatures would be a huge departure from the way the forum has been up until now...  it shouldn't be done until it's clear that there's a broad consensus on the forum in favor of it, on par with what was sought before transitioning to the new forum in the first place.  If what you assume about the impact Janus' mod has on opinion is true, it should be easy to form that consensus now; but I am simply not seeing it.

[Mikademus]

You really have a misconception of what a banner ad is. Take a look at Vellos's signature again.



Vellos's image does not link to anything. His site links are text. So why do you loathe it, again?

It is, nonetheless, a large glaring banner ad; it's shaped like a banner ad, garishly-colored like a banner ad, and has the same deleterious impact on the appearance of any page where it appears.  The fact that it is intended to advertise the poster and not their website makes it, if anything, even worse.

I do not loathe it, specifically.  It is within a category of items that are entirely loathsome, worthy of loathing, a state that all unnecessary banner ads intrinsically share, regardless of what they advertise.  The concept that someone could seriously consider such a glaring banner-ad to be acceptable as a sig is hard to fathom; I can accept, perhaps, that some people have gotten so used to such things that their eyes simply glide over the wretched thing without really seeing it, but that does not change the fact that it makes every place where it appears worse.

It is a banner-ad no matter how you look at it.  Why would anyone accept unnecessary banner-ads?

Ok, you're making an argument based on aesthetics. As such, with your statements, you're also in effect saying that your personal sense of aesthetics is better or more relevant than those you argue against. Newsflash: aesthetics is personal, and thus your argumentation is in fact worthless because everybody are entitled to their own aesthetical categories. Unless you define a set of objective criteria for judgement that the rest of the populate agrees on, then the only group that your opinion is of relevance to consists of you.

Now drop it. Turn off sigs in your options, and let those that want them have 'em.

[Aquillion]

Ok, you're making an argument based on aesthetics. As such, with your statements, you're also in effect saying that your personal sense of aesthetics is better or more relevant than those you argue against. Newsflash: aesthetics is personal, and thus your argumentation is in fact worthless because everybody are entitled to their own aesthetical categories. Unless you define a set of objective criteria for judgement that the rest of the populate agrees on, then the only group that your opinion is of relevance to consists of you.

Now drop it. Turn off sigs in your options, and let those that want them have 'em.

Aha, but there are people here who agree with me -- and our argument that we find image sigs to be distracting and annoying is, inherently, a more compelling argument than your position that you do not find them distracting and annoying.  You can still read a forum without sigs without difficulty, and have not claimed to be offended by it; you can't credibly claim that such a forum is basically offensive to your sense of aesthetics, when you have already been using it like that for so long.

You can say that image sigs don't bother you, or even that you would enjoy them; but their absence is not itself causing any problems for you, while many people have repeatedly said that their addition would cause problems for them.

If image signatures offend nearly half the people here, they are plainly not acceptable; in other words, if you want to argue in favor of image signatures, it is not enough for you to say that they do not offend you.  You must be able to argue that they do not offend me, or, at least, people like me, because that is the issue at hand here.  You must be able to demonstrate either that very few people are bothered by them, or that you absolutely need them in a compelling fashion that justifies offending the sensibilities of a fairly large segment of the forum; I feel you have failed to make either argument convincingly.

As I said, while the option to disable them is nice, I can't always be logged in when I browse the forum (public computers with cookies disabled, and so forth); it is not enough of a solution to justify simply steamrollering the significant resistance to image signatures that you can see in this thread.

[Draco18s]

And the overall shape of the poll hasn't changed since that announcement was made.  Fundamentally, even if you have the option to log in and disable them, I think that enabling image signatures would be a huge departure from the way the forum has been up until now...  it shouldn't be done until it's clear that there's a broad consensus on the forum in favor of it, on par with what was sought before transitioning to the new forum in the first place.  If what you assume about the impact Janus' mod has on opinion is true, it should be easy to form that consensus now; but I am simply not seeing it.

On the grounds that adding images to signatures is a HUGE departure from what the forums are supposed to be, then WHY for the Love of Toady do 50 some people want to trim, snip, and truncate signatures down to TWO LINES?!?

Answer me that one.  The old forums were good enough at an unlimited length (what, 500 characters?  That's a half-page essay), why trim them down so far?  Two lines isn't even enough for half of the humorous game-ASCII-art stuff we had on the old forums.

[Mikademus]

Ok, you're making an argument based on aesthetics. As such, with your statements, you're also in effect saying that your personal sense of aesthetics is better or more relevant than those you argue against. Newsflash: aesthetics is personal, and thus your argumentation is in fact worthless because everybody are entitled to their own aesthetical categories. Unless you define a set of objective criteria for judgement that the rest of the populate agrees on, then the only group that your opinion is of relevance to consists of you.

Now drop it. Turn off sigs in your options, and let those that want them have 'em.

Aha, but there are people here who agree with me -- and our argument that we find image sigs to be distracting and annoying is, inherently, a more compelling argument than your position that you do not find them distracting and annoying. 

That there are people agreeing with you is irrelevant in itself, there are people agreeing with those opposed to you as well.

However, you invoke two principles:
(1) The principle of greatest suffering, which states that the party suffering the greatest injury has is to be respected and considered more (if someone doesn't like loud noises then you are immoral when partying loudly in the neighbouring flat).

(2) That a unqualified majority should not mean that the converse minority shall suffer having no influence.

I sympathise with argument #1 - a party suffering shall be respected. However, this principle should also be invoked reasonably, but honestly: forum signatures, THAT CAN BE TURNED OFF, does not fall under the categories of reason and conscientiousness without diluting and devaluing the principle itself.

Secondly, I agree with you that the near-half minority shouldn't have to suffer democratic despotism, but rather a compromise solution should be desirable. How about this: you, the losing minority, turn off signature images in your settings?

[Draco18s]

Secondly, I agree with you that the near-half minority shouldn't have to suffer democratic despotism, but rather a compromise solution should be desirable. How about this: you, the losing minority, turn off signature images in your settings?

Gasp!  The logic!

[Aquillion]

On the grounds that adding images to signatures is a HUGE departure from what the forums are supposed to be, then WHY for the Love of Toady do 50 some people want to trim, snip, and truncate signatures down to TWO LINES?!?

Answer me that one.  The old forums were good enough at an unlimited length (what, 500 characters?  That's a half-page essay), why trim them down so far?  Two lines isn't even enough for half of the humorous game-ASCII-art stuff we had on the old forums.

Unimportant.  Regardless of all the various options that were presented, I think the overall end result that would be acceptable to the most people would be simply keeping sigs the way they were before.

The poll results support this -- notice, out of all the individual options, which one is winning?  It's 3-6 lines, text only.  That matches, for practical purposes, what most sigs were on the old forums.  The further you go from the way the old forums worked, the more steeply the numbers decline.

That there are people agreeing with you is irrelevant in itself, there are people agreeing with those opposed to you as well.

However, you invoke two principles:
(1) The principle of greatest suffering, which states that the party suffering the greatest injury has is to be respected and considered more (if someone doesn't like loud noises then you are immoral when partying loudly in the neighbouring flat).

(2) That a unqualified majority should not mean that the converse minority shall suffer having no influence.

I sympathise with argument #1 - a party suffering shall be respected. However, this principle should also be invoked reasonably, but honestly: forum signatures, THAT CAN BE TURNED OFF, does not fall under the categories of reason and conscientiousness without diluting and devaluing the principle itself.

Secondly, I agree with you that the near-half minority shouldn't have to suffer democratic despotism, but rather a compromise solution should be desirable. How about this: you, the losing minority, turn off signature images in your settings?

But you have failed to provide any convincing arguments to upset the status quo.  When placed against the amount and strength of opposition, no really strong reason has been presented why the forum requires image signatures, or why even (for instance) a compromised offense that is limited to when I am on a public terminal should be required.

Calling us the "losing minority" does not win you any points; this is not a democracy and this poll is not a vote.  It is a tool to determine if consensus exists to change the status quo; it is plain, looking at it, that there is a deep divide and such consensus does not currently exist.

If you want to move forwards at all with a change that offends nearly half the forum to one degree or another, you must provide a strong argument in its favor; "it does not bother me" is not sufficient.  And, likewise, if you feel that you are offering a fair compromise, you should be able to demonstrate it by actually achieving a strong consensus around that compromise; simply claiming that your compromise is fair is not a substitute.

[Sergius]

At this point, the anti-signature picture argument boils down to:

I want to have the right to forbid other people from looking at signatures.

[Dwarmin]

My math should be right

Nay:143

Yay:154

Anti-sig may be a minority, but only by 11 votes. So which side wants to leave the forums if you dont get your way? 

[slMagnvox]

Aquillion fighting the good fight.

If you want to move forwards at all with a change that offends nearly half the forum to one degree or another, you must provide a strong argument in its favor; "it does not bother me" is not sufficient.  And, likewise, if you feel that you are offering a fair compromise, you should be able to demonstrate it by actually achieving a strong consensus around that compromise; simply claiming that your compromise is fair is not a substitute.

That is the real gasp logic right there.  There has been no evidence giving support to the case that signature images will be in any way beneficial.  Plenty of, argueable, support that they won't be godawful, but no one has given a compelling arguement that they will in anyway positively enchance the forum experience.

And again, its been countered several times before, saying just turn them off is not an effective counter arguement and does nothing to suggest that sig images will have any beneficial impact on the forums.

[Kagus]

For me, the actual images in a signature are only a minor annoyance (although they are indeed an annoyance).  The main thing is the attitude expressed by those who put so much emphasis on their signatures.  That attitude is something that I want to see kept as far away from these forums as possible, because this happens to be the only forum on the internet that I happen to like, and I'd like to be able to stick around for a while longer.

I'm already seeing that kind of attitude popping up, and I'm damn worried about it.  Looking at the way this discussion has turned out, and the fact that DF is probably going to be picking up some more popularity in the near future, I know that completely unrestricted sigs are eventually going to be the norm, along with all the other trappings.  Resisting it is just going to delay things, not stop them.

I just want to raise a little awareness for the attitude and the hell that can rise up from it, in the hopes that a few of the more sensible folks will understand what they're doing and take a breather.   There will come a time when the DF forums change into something that I no longer want to be a part of, but I just want that time to be a long ways away.

[slMagnvox]

At this point, the anti-signature picture argument boils down to:

I want to have the right to forbid other people from looking at signatures.

At this point, the pro-signature pic arguement boils down to:

I want to append an irrelevant banner ad on each and every one of my posts just because I can.

The anti debate has been much better defined.

• Wasted bandwidth.  10kb of waste is still wasted bandwidth
• Visually distracting
• Some will be tasteless and offensive
• They are not in the spirit of the game (ASCII) nor the forums (image free since 2003)

[Surma]

For the "Wasted bandwidth" argument, I should point out For the 2 Adams in which the OP makes a simple comment, which is then immediately blown completely out of proportion with a multi-page flame war going full force.

Yeah, no waste of KB there.

"Visually distracting", heh maybe for the first ten seconds or so. The eye -may- be drawn to it but that doesn't mean you are forced to look at it. Again, if you are so bothered by it it's now possible to turn them off.

"Some will be tasteless and offensive" yeah, this is the Internet where everything is offensive to someone. Seriously, in all honesty that is my personal opinion. You can't market to everyone.

... sorry started writing this two hours ago (or at least it seemed that long) and got side tracked by Flame Warriors.. I forgot what my argument was. Ah well.

[Elvenshae]

An upgraded forum is not in the spirit of the DF community.

Accordingly, we should have stuck with the old version.

And, since when has this game been ASCII?  It's a sprite-based game that, coincidentally, uses ASCII-like representations as the default, but not the only, method of display.  Personally, I've been using the various tilesets since I found out how to turn them on.

Some posts are tasteless and offensive; should we ban everyone from posting?  No, that would be dumb.  So, instead, the very limited amount of moderation that is required focuses on those people who do nothing but post tasteless and offensive stuff.

Similarly, just because some people will put tasteless images in their .sigs is no reason to ban everyone from putting images in their .sigs.

With one or two lines of text, I could insult and defame each and every one of you; I could post the most hateful, ignorant bullshit imaginable.  I could include links to depictions depraved sexual acts, hatemongers' screeds, and do-it-yourself suicide instructions.  The fact is, I don't need a flashing neon image in my .sig to be an asshat.

The only way to absolutely prevent asshatery in .sigs is to ban them entirely - or to ban the people who use them for that purpose.  Given the absolutely small number of people  who fall into that second category, the moderation burden will be light.

As far as the anti debate:

• Wasted Bandwidth: Addressed.  Since turning off .sig images will cause them to not even be sent to your computer, their is no bandwidth hit associated with them.
• Visually Distracting: Addressed.  Since you can turn them off, they will no longer distract you.
• Tasteless and Offensive: Addressed. You wont see them when they're turned off, and, moreover, a tasteless / offensive .sig is just as banworthy as a tasteless / offensive post.  Since the mods have indicated no continuing issues with policing the latter, they should have no issue policing the former.  For those of you who believe that, as soon as they're turned on this forum will immediately turn into 4chan ... seriously?  Are you absolutely sure that's the stance you want to take?  Do you really think so highly of your fellow Dwarf Fortress enthusiasts?
• Spirit of the Game: Personal preference. Dwarf Fortress is, at best, tangentially ASCII and, as it moves forward and interface improvements are added, this, too, will change.
• Spirit of the Forum: Personal preference.  Stickies are also not in the "spirit of the forum" (Sticky-free since 2003!).  Why aren't you rallying against them?  Especially since you can turn off .sig images, but you can't turn off stickies cluttering up the top of every forum.  I've seen forums where the first 10 threads on every page were damn stickies, so I know that allowing them here means that the DF forums will, overnight, turn into a place where you can only see one new thread on each page because of all the damn stickies floating around.

So, again, the non-"I don't like them, so you shouldn't have them" Anti-side arguments have been addressed.  That leaves the anti-side standing firmly in the "I want to have the right to forbid other people from looking at signature [images]" camp.[/list]