User Icon changes

[wide_worlds_joy]

Title:
User Icon changes

Area:
Styles

Summary:
Paid feature where the user can change the person icon next to their username.

Description:
Recently LJ implemented the ability to change the little icon next to a username site-wide. I'd like to see the same here, but with a few improvements.

First, free to paid accounts. It might just prompt people to buy a paid account.

Second, the image has to be hosted on another site, so it is not clogging up the servers of DW. Or an icon slot can be "sacrificed" to host it here.

Third, only small icons, 17x17 will be allowed.

This will be just a little thing to give some more color to DW. May pull some of LJ's customers over as well.

In execution it will look like this:

<a href='http://daven.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='http://www.rosequoll.com/lj/bdragon.gif' alt='userinfo' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align:bottom;border:0;'></a><a href='http://daven.dreamwidth.org'><b>daven</b></a>

I got this from a lady who had this on LJ, and I think it's a cool idea.

Poll #5991 User Icon changes

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 85

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
11 (12.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
13 (15.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
47 (55.3%)

(I have no opinion)
14 (16.5%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

Just FYI, if this is implemented, the images would have to be hosted locally. Otherwise, there'd be nothing stopping someone from using (say) a 2000px by 2000px image for their userhead and disrupting things for everyone else!

[moonvoice]

I might be alone, but I never liked this feature over at Livejournal, and I found it made it very hard for me to tell easily and quickly who were LJ Staff, and who were just people who had gotten this nifty feature. I think for me personally, it's an extra degree of customisation that makes things more complicated in long comment threads.

[ratcreature]

I have to admit that I find these customized userheads on LJ horrible. Most of the time I can't make out what they are supposed to be because it is so tiny, and IMO they detract from a clean look of the page.

[azurelunatic]

I get a weird little jolt every time I see the userhead of someone in particular who I'm avoiding. Since it's a standard custom userhead that now a lot more people are using, this does make things somewhat unpleasant for me. It's not LJ's fault, but it is an opportunity for things like this to happen. And I can't really adblock it, because the userheads have the contextual hover menu, and they link to the profile.

So if it happens, it should have a viewer-side off-switch, usable for logged-in users and ... maybe even be settable by cookie for logged-out and accountless users in the same way that site scheme is. (Huh, now I wonder what happens with logged out users and ?style=mine.)

[ursamajor]

I agree with the previous posters - I feel like the userheads are too small to serve any useful purpose except for differentiating account type (staff vs. user, community, official. And if it's not well-done, it won't even do that.

[foxfirefey]

Another interesting exploit side effect of not being hosted locally would being able to track wherever your user head was appearing, even in locked posts, as browsers fetched the image from your server!

[eruthros]

I understand why people like custom userheads and want to use them, but a lot of them are hard for me to parse in a page -- I find them confusing and can't track them easily (especially since, in my 1920x1200 laptop display, most of them are too small to be legible). I wouldn't object to dw using them, but I would like to have an opt-out option that would mean I could see just the standard userheads.

[ariestess]

+1

I did some of the customization from rosequoll.com several years ago, but it was a pain to deal with after a while, and just looked horridly cluttered.

[noracharles]

Yes. I wouldn't mind users being able to set their own userheads, as long as I would never have to see them. I would only ever want to see the standard userheads. For me it would be okay if that were only in my style, since I use my style site-wide.

[musyc]

No, no, no, please. I'd only appreciate this suggestion if there was a way for me to block them entirely via a site-setting without having to rig some CSS up on my own. They're hideously ugly to my eyes. I cobbled bits into a Stylish sheet specifically to get rid of those on LJ, and I'd hate them here.

[cesy]

With an off-switch, so I could just see standard userheads, I wouldn't mind this.

[wide_worlds_joy]

Yay, another suggestion of mine hated.

sigh

Bad night...

[denise]

Aw! It can be tough sometimes, I know, but I really appreciate each and every suggestion that comes through (ok, maybe not the ones that are four words long, three of which are one of George Carlin's seven deadly, but I digress). Just caring enough about DW to want to make a suggestion is a grand and glorious thing, and thank you :)

[matgb]

Meh, you're getting a should be vote from me. I'll never use the feature, but I really don't care when I see others have on LJ, and lots of people appear to be paying money for the feature.

Anything that improves site revenue in a way that doesn't annoy me is a good thing, even if it's not something I care for.

A part of me wonders if wording of suggestion makes a big difference for some things--I'm pretty sure my last LJ suggestion was rejected by commenters because it mentioned DW and was a feature from DW that I wanted there. But there's no way of us knowing.

[pseudomonas]

I think there's an interoperability problem with this idea, though - at the moment DW can generate the HTML for, say pseudomonas. If pseudomonas has some arbitrary userhead image, this gets more difficult.

[dingsi]

+1

To me a different userhead means a different function/status, e.g. staff members, deleted journals, and the like. So if I could make out what they were supposed to be at all, they always made following comment threads more complicated for me.

[justhuman]

This, with an optional on/off switch. I find that I don't like them, and it clutters the reading, but enough people are using them, that saying no all together seems unfair.

[the_shoshanna]

I'm -- not sure how to vote on this. Personally I dislike the custom userheads over on LJ; I find them cluttered and visually confusing and mostly ugly and they make it nearly impossible to identify staff immediately (uh, does LJ even use specific staff userheads the way DW does? I can't remember. But having custom userheads over here would tend to have that effect, because the staff ones could get lost in the clutter). I don't need or want a custom userhead in order to identify a specific individual (or be identified myself), that's what usernames are for.

But people sure do seem to like the damn things over on LJ. And if it were a paid feature here, that suggests it would bring in money as well as making some users happy. It would make me (and apparently others) grumpy. So yeah, an opt-out-of-ever-seeing-the-bloody-things switch would be greatly appreciated in that case. But then we get into options creep, right? Too many options makes the baby synecdochic cry.

I'm not sure I can argue forcefully against it. But I hope it doesn't happen (or that if it does, we can opt out of seeing them).

[aedifica]

I voted no because I don't like them on LJ and would rather not see them here, but I wouldn't really mind them if I could easily turn them off--only I would want to be sure that turning them off wouldn't turn off the userheads that say "this is a staff journal" et al.

[azurelunatic]

They do: staff are the greenshirts. But only some staff? Or something like that.

[azurelunatic]

And if it's pick-your-own, should probably be looked over by someone to make sure that they are not, at minimum, a staff-head lookalike.

[azurelunatic]

LJ has this feature live. People are using it. If one considers DW being unable to reproduce the exact userhead that an account on LJ has at the moment an interoperability problem, then it's a real live current interoperability problem, not a potential future interoperability problem.

[azurelunatic]

Wording makes a huge difference. In my observation, some regulars there are willing to accept any improvement that people will like that isn't disruptive; some are as uncomfortable with the idea of features that come from DW as people used to be about features that came from MySpace.

[susanreads]

+1

[erika]

Agreed.