forum avatars (re)considered evil
Despite my hatred of web forums, there are some I need to visit fairly regularly. For example, while I generally use Gentoo’s user mailing list if I have a question, searching the Gentoo forums can turn up a lot of good info. It also turns up a lot of avatars I don’t want to see, including animated ones.
The title of this post is a bit misleading. I’m not going to consider these avatars and what’s so annoying about them. If you like them, fine, and keep looking at them. Did I mention I hate them, though? Well, I do. So I gave a little thought about how to best get rid of them. There are many ways, from just turning off images while I browse forums to writing css to hide them. But the quickest way I happened to have at my fingertips was to use Adblock Plus, one of my favorite Firefox extensions.
A quick look at the Gentoo forums showed that all the avatars live in the same directory on the Gentoo site itself, which makes blocking them extra super easy. (That’s right, I said extra super easy.) I went to a forum page, opened Adblock Plus’ list of blockable items and clicked one of the avatar URIs, then changed the filename to a nice generic wildcard asterisk.
http://forums.gentoo.org/images/avatars/*
So now I’ll never see the cute little pictures while I read about Gentoo. Of course, I’d need to do something similar for any forums I want to read, but it’s simple enough that I almost don’t mind.
I have to say that ABP is effective. No pop up issues, and, while I don’t hate the animated avatars with the same fervor, having control over that when needed is a great thing. Super duper even. Thas right. I said Super duper even.