"Do our icons have to be limited to Star Wars?"...

As much as I would love to keep my Borg Queen icon year-round (at last I have something to show people when they ask what I look like! Har de har har!), I don't think there's any practical way to start bringing in non-Star Wars icons when the JC has a limited number of icons allowed it. There would be threads in Comm every week:
Why are there no Harry Potter icons?
Why are there no Babylon 5 icons?
Why are there no UPN sitcom icons?

There are a lot of subcultural interests among the members here, and there isn't really a fair way to decide which few non-Star Wars themed icons should be kept.

 

I don't think there's any practical way to start bringing in non-Star Wars icons when the JC has a limited number of icons allowed it

There is a maximum number of icons we can have?

 

Dark Lady Mara-- hmm, why ARE there no UPN sitcom icons?




Rick McCallum loves you!

 

I don't know if there's a technical limit or not. There's a manageability limit, though. I figured that was the motivation for the recent icon deletions.

Edit: Adam, I don't know. Should I make one?

 

[image=http://www.xieish.com/moesha.gif]

 

xie is officially a genius.



Rick McCallum loves you!

 

Give 'em an inch, G-S, and they'll take a mile.


We have 791 total icons, and 156 Halloween ones. That makes 635 SW icons for the JC to choose from. That is more than I have ever seen on another board that hosted it's own icons. Members already have plenty to choose from, and we keep adding more. The makers and the mods do a lot of work to make sure everyone can find an icon they enjoy. It should be plenty.

 

This is the first I've heard that the Lucasarts Games icons will be staying, and I made them. Mind you, I've been a little out of touch this last week.

I'll open some lines of communication amongst the AC and Mods and see what we can come up with...

 

Don't you have to have IGN upload the icon for you at their boards? I'm not too familiar with them.

 

Plenty of free boards allow that. I for one wholeheartedly support this idea, but it will come up against some heavy opposition for the same reasons that manual sig images did, such as overloading a certain server. I'd love to see this feature implemented, though.

 

If everyone is allowed to use their own icons, then the mods will have to patrol to make sure no one has "inappropriate" icons. And when it's their icon, it isn't as easy as editting out a bad pic from a post, it's gonna take more time, and probably an admin to access the password to change the icon. :/

 

So build in a way for admins to change a user's icon if it is inappropriate. Inappropriate icons would be the only other major hurdle for this sort of idea, and if you can enforce it, then I don't see a problem.

 

"So build in a way for admins to change a user's icon if it is inappropriate."


Do you want to pay to hire zerosleep to program that into SnowBoards?


Well, a link in a sig is different. The actual image isn't immediately viewed when reading the thread. Yea, it would still be as much work, but in the time it takes to remove it, more people would see the icon than would click on the link.


But, there is still the question of the bandwith strain. My pathetic site that allows direct linking crashed on me just because of my icon I use at the SoBe boards. :/ Anyone that agrees to make icons and host them is going to have to pay the bills for it, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that.

But, if the mods wanna do this, I would hope they still keep the icons that are currently available, so that those who are not introwebnet-savy can still have an avatar.

 

I'm not sure if this helps much but there are exceptions when it comes to fan force. We have our own icons. The British icon isn't SW related. It's DangerMouse related!

 

and keep in mind that if they're stealing an icon from somewhere else, the host can change it to something pornographic without them knowing.

while it is a really cool idea, on boards such as these i don't know how realistic it would be...

 

Nope. We're a Star Wars board, not an LOTR board, not a UPN board, not a Harry Potter board. While these Halloween icons are fun just for the holiday, I don't think we should have non-SW related icons as a permanent thing.

 

If we had more icons that were not Star Wars related, there would be not as much room for the Star Wars Icons. And what someone said about people asking for a specific icon that only maybe one person would use is pretty much a waste of space for only one person to be happy. I've said it before, if the people don't like whats here, what's keeping them?

Lastat

 

There is a thread in Mod Squad discussing this option. My initial feeling is it would be good for the boards. All biases aside, many folks who like Star Wars also enjoy sci-fi in general. They'd be ecstatic to have a Spock icon. Also, fans of Star Wars tend to love Indiana Jones. And LOTR is quite popular.

I see no harm in uploading a few. And besides, we have uploaded in the past few months more icons than we've ever had. In fact, we're a little saturated with the icons insofar as we have multiple copies of the same character. We don't need 20 Obi-Wan's. We don't need 45 Padmé's.

 

We're considering it. But I don't want everyone to interpret that as a yes. The discussion is in an early stage and admins from other time zones have yet to chime in. We'd have to determine which films, how many icons, etc...

 

I think we should have a few icons that are not SW-related but still related to Lucasfilm, like an Indiana Jones icon or a Willow icon.

Like a Mad Martigan icon, perhaps? Now the thought of that just got me excited.

 

We are a Star Wars board first and foremost, but a few unrelated icons wouldn't go to miss.

In regards to linking to your own Icon images, I would be against this idea. More and more sites (and especially the free hosting sitges) are turning off the ability to remote link to Images.

This would mean that some of the Images underneath each name will have "sorry, remote linking prohibited" or even worse! Little red 'X's!

 

These would be uploaded to TF.N's server.

 

We're considering it.

We ARE? For some reason the AC doesn't seem to know that yet.

 

I started an AC thread on this yesterday.

For what it's worth the discussion is on allowing some Lucas-related non-Star Wars icons in.

eg.
Films: Howard the Duck, Indiana Jones, THX-1138, THX sound, Willow, American Graffiti.

Games: Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, Sam & Max, RTX Red Rocks, Gladius etc.

After all TFn reports on non-SW Lucasfilm projects and non-SW Luacasarts games.

And there are JC forums for each of those topics.

But there's no room here for LOTR, Star Trek, Matrix etc icons, that's pretty much obvious, one would think.

 

I know. My point was it's funny for the administration to announce they've pretty much decided what they're going to do when the AC thread was just recently started and not everyone has had a chance to reply yet.

Anyway, my opinion about LFL-related icons is pretty much the same as my opinion about non-LFL-related icons. I think the line for just what is LFL-related could be stretched a lot and many members could be unhappy if they don't get specific icons they want. Since this is a Star Wars board, the current set of Star Wars icons (and a few Star Wars actors icons) is great.