Topic on Talk:LiquidThreads 3.0/Design

Eloquence (talkcontribs)

Lots of very good thoughts went into this -- thanks for all the hard work.

I would suggest reconsidering the notion that avatars not be visible by default. If indeed avatars are a good idea (and it would be great if we could somehow test that hypothesis), offensive avatars are likely going to be dealt with in much the same way that offensive usernames are currently dealt with, i.e. fairly quickly. If that is not the case, then I'm not sure an opt-out/opt-in mechanism is going to help much -- it just seems to add complication to the overall system that should be avoidable.

Werdna (talkcontribs)

I'd like to discuss this at some point, along with Philippe.

I think the idea of hiding for anonymous users might be sound, but I'm not sure on hiding by default for logged-in users, and I definitely think it should be an AJAX button to turn them on.

Jorm (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I had a discussion with Mike about what our legal culpability would be in regards to this and he said that there was basically none whatsoever, so it doesn't matter if we hide or not.

Given that, I think it's probably smart to chop the entire opt-in/out system for avatars as an un-needed complication. The community may feel otherwise, but if this is the case we can always add the functionality then.

MaxSem (talkcontribs)

One thing I love about plaintext MediaWiki discussions is that they're extremely concise in appearance: minimum spacing between posts, inline signatures instead of the insanity an average forum offers, nothing to hurt my eyes (custom signatures that are really ugly are rare, not only due to technical limitation of 255 bytes per sig, but also due to community's negative attitude towards them). LQT already departs from some of these principles for a good reason - and I must say that it is implemented in a maximally non-intrusive way. Hovewer, avatars are a different things: they add more visual noise, take away valuable screen space (especially important for threaded discussions with ever-increasing indentation), encourage MySpacing and distract people from discussion itself. Even worse (much, much worse) are animated avatars, the abomination on the face of the Earth that increase the negative impact by orders of magnitude. Not to speak of new possibilities of trolling.

One must understand that avatars are features from media intended for communication (forums, social networks and IM), and not for content creation, which MediaWiki is intended for. Therefore I object strongly against avatars at all, and if they will be implemented, believe that they should at be hidden by default and animated avatars be uncompromisingly disabled.

šŸ˜‚ (talkcontribs)

+1 to everything Max said. I don't find avatars to be particularly useful for anything except trolling and used as status symbols.

To repeat what I said on IRC: ^demon: So anyway, I hate the idea of avatars. I know it's probably coming regardless of what I say, but meh...I want to go on record as saying "bad idea."

Kghbln (talkcontribs)

Edit conflict. Hi, I agree, this redesign proposal is really cool! I think it is best to disable avatars as a standard. If someone really needs them, he or she may turn it on. Cheers --kgh 10:51, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

P858snake (talkcontribs)

Summing up (mostly) my notes from the little I.R.C. discussion:

  • Visual Space waste, People love minimalism these days
  • Visual Distraction sometimes
    • Personally I love my fluro (example: pink, green) colour avatars, others obsessively don't. Although this does already exist with our sigs, its alot less abus-able.
  • Copy Right issues, People love their avatars that they just grab off random sites
    • Would need a way to restrict/disable users from uploading images after multiple warnings
  • Cross-Wiki, People these days on WMF wikis want cross wiki for everything and anything, which means they would need to be uploaded to a shared repo.
    • Our largest and only(?) cross wiki repo is Commons, which takes a very strict approach in regards to removing copyrighted stuff, which will just induce more moaning.
Kghbln (talkcontribs)

I think the decision strongly depends on who will be using avatars. Wikia undoubtedly will opt for avatars, Wikipedia as you already stated hopefully will not. Avatars might also be useful for other wikis out there in the web. Since Wikipedia is top priority, I think you will all agree on this, the redesign should not cater for avatars in the first place. If this works stable...

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

I actually think that avatars would be nice to have. Obviously, as pointed out above, there are a few things to consider.

A special page (or some other mechanism) for privileged users to allow removing other users' avatars would be helpful; or then we could do it how wikiHow does. Once an avatar is uploaded, an admin has to approve it before it is shown. SocialProfile extension handles the avatar system by providing an upload page, Special:UploadAvatar, to upload avatars and an avatar removal page, Special:RemoveAvatar, for privileged users to remove others' avatars.

Which brings me to the next point...how would avatars be stored? As normal files? SocialProfile stores them separately in $wgUploadPath/avatars/ and they are not treated as normal wiki files (i.e. they don't have a File: page and so on).

Also, it would be useful to have a user preference to enable/disable the displaying of avatar images. This way people who don't want to see avatars wouldn't have to, but those who want to see them would be able to.

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

Maybe avatars could be simply stored in some .js user subpage (to avoid reinventing the wheel), or the same approach could be adopted: .css/.js subpages are editable by the user and by sysops. Avatars should obviously be free images, on WMF wikis, since they can't be allowed by any EDP. Best solution: don't develop avatars ourselves (we're not interested in them), let Wikia do that.Ā :-)

Filburt (talkcontribs)

It would be great if LiquidThreads could use the SocialProfile Avatars if both extensions are installed... both extensions address a more social feeling and a personalized Wiki - so they should work together!

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