Originally Posted by
Punki
3. Every large bulletin board that I have checked at big-boards.com (and I freely admit that I haven't had time to check all 2,000 of them) allows avatars and pictures. That fact would lead me to believe that images are both very much the wave of the future (even the present) and highly popular among internet users. If a board with over a billion posts can manage images, I suspect we can too--we are pretty smart cookies.
Personally, I would be looking for a rather more reasoned type of argument than "plenty of people do it, so we should do it too" (you know, lemmings and all that...).
I think that Randy has admirably summed up what, independently of the moderation issues, some of us think. Is FT's aim to be the biggest and brashest of them all or does it aim at a more sophisticated and understated style? If the former, yes by all means let us go for avatars galore whatever the implications for mods. If the latter, it seems to me that the case still needs to be made since, as far as I can see, nobody has identified a need that cannot be fulfilled by a photogallery or, at a push, optional images in profiles.
References to myspace, facebook, etc... are neither here nor there as these sites serve wholly different purposes to FT. I just don't get the appeal of the "we want to be exactly just like any other site" arguments. I like FT precisely because it is NOT just like any other site.