Thread:Talk:LiquidThreads/Redesign/Avatar visibility/reply (3)

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.