Does anyone else here get a spinal chill? I know linking to images, be it for whatever purpose (including emoji/emojies <-- what's the plural?) is covered by the ToS as it's "content", but I really think it'd be a good idea to establish some ground rules. I don't just mean size, that can be limited by auto-scaling (override BBCode), and I'm not talking explicit content either; I'm talking image spam. Unecessary bandwidth by 4MB animated GIFs, image-only replies, posts where each sentence ends in an image, etc. I can see this getting out of hand because I have seen it get out of hand before on a forum I used to frequent. Mods (a bit like here) were in short supply and struggled to keep mopping up and eventually an admin capped images completely until they could implement some restrictions on a software level. Give folks an inch, they take a mile. Imagine a newcomer:
IamDa1337H4x0r357|3570f@11 said:
hey [people], sup? iam noob [lol/happy gif] to linux but am kloving it [sparkly heart gif] [sparkly heart gif] [sparkly heart gif] anyway i have a problem [confused] like it starts but then say kernel panic [spinning question mark] [spinning question mark] [spinning question mark]
This possible future thread may have said:
So I just got back from vacation... blah blah blah... Anyway, good to be back.
Cool! [massive animated gif]
And steadily our communication ability regresses back to pictures, a digital parallel to cave paintings -- only uglier, less original, more generic, and so forth.
Just having guidelines for new users will probably prevent that. Just to reiterate: I know there are Ts&Cs on content, but I think it has to be more explicit/overt now that Pandora's Box is open.
Maybe I'm biased by bad experience. Maybe I'm biased because I read a book about online communication limiting our vocab and ability to accurately express ourselves, replacing it with pictures, most of which are factory-pressed generic animations (each time I see that woman from <insert sitcom> laughing and spitting drink/water out, I lose brain cells -- a scarce resource for me).
I'm not saying it's totally wrong. There's context. Well,
was with GIFs when it was funny/original, used to augment a response rather than a substitute for a linguistic-based language. So, yes, they can be useful/funny and even an angry stone-age man like me can appreciate (in the loosest sense of the word) that fact. It's just a case of context and boundaries.
...And lemme just slip in a terribly-timed total topic tangent, to this: I really, really think we could do better on those "like" button images (and would be happy to contribute). Yeah, uh, irrelevancy noted, back to the topic...
As I said, I acknowledge personal biases here. I also acknowledge my tendancies to see the extreme fringe cases as a standard as well as my general cynical outlook and predisposition to FUD.
But I do think the mod team should chat about it at the very least.
Cheers,
- J
finally I feel The Smiley Power on my fingertips ... 
)
) emojis become a trend topic 
My philosopyh in that new debate is "Find a solution other than banning". This reminds me the one of nine Linux philosophy in here, "Small is beautiful" : smileys are beatiful because they are small !
