avatars discrimination
Categories: life
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I recently have been visiting a nice assortment of forums that have been hit by a pr0n spammer after getting hit by the spammer myself. Fortunately, the good folks at vBulletin included a feature in 2.3.0 that stops bot spammers. I noticed that the avatars used from forum to forum varies a lot with the forum. For example, a fish forum (a forum about a specific type of fish that had >20k posts) had a majority of fish avatars or people’s real pictures– even someone with a “I’m a g33k” T-shirt. Then visiting a forum about Guilty Gear, there were a lot of Dizzy images for avatars. Not surprisingly, I didn’t see any images of fish or a “I’m a g33k T-shirt”. Though I expected to see a “I’m a Dizzy fanboy” T-shirt at the very least.
The more varied forums are the global help ones at my webhost and the vB forums themselves. Here I found a wider range, but they were mostly predictable stuff like cartoon characters like Wile E. Coyote or just pretty text that just replicates their username. Most people don’t have avatars since they just post once and leave. Like my namesake, I use a cat avatar and cat-like username for these two forums though I’m seriously thinking of changing it to some Chikage x Sakuya action. Who wouldn’t like that?
On the sba forums, most people have– predictably– Belldandy as their avatar. I do have this anal policy of using a standard avatar templete, but it does make everything look neat. It also prevents people from getting into silly avatar wars. Oddly, zero females use Belldandy, and the forum member named “Belldandy” uses KOS-MOS (not that I’m complaining about KOS-MOS). It’s also rare to see an user name and avatar match up, and it’s weird to see the name “Skuldblah” with a picture of Inu Yasha under it. Even when the name/avatar does match up, I really don’t want to see stuff like Cartman’s face next to Keiichi’s. It’s not natural and beyond poor taste. Most of the users have some anime-centric avatar, which is expected.
A memorable avatar:
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I use avatars for familiarity. It’s usually easy for me to scan down a long thread and see who said what by looking at the picture rather than looking at the name, especially on a forum where 120 members have some variation of “Keiichi Morisato” as their username. Sorry, but calling yourself “K-1-MORISATO” won’t distinguish yourself from the “MORISATO-K1” user. Avatars are just another way to help tell users apart, and it’s best to have a distinctive avatar that people will remember, or at least not get confused with someone else’s.
