JCD said:
NO! What the hell could be wrong with emoticons? If people don't want to use them, fine. No need to ruin our fun.
Yeah, but I have absolutely no control over somebody else using them. It's fine to say if you don't like 'em don't use 'em, but what if someone decides they love them and what to use them all the time?
joeblow: it's moving more towards every other forum on the internet. I always liked GR because it was simpler, less distraction from the conversation. Have you ever posted on GameFAQ's old boards (before their site redesign a few years ago when they were acquired by CNet)? Everything was text. The only two images on the entire page was their logo (which was small, something like 200x100 px) and a vertical advertisement on the left. No emoticons, or new post indicators, or anything. You couldn't even post an image in your message, you had to link to it. I actually liked that.
On the old GR UBB boards, there were no custom avatars, it was a ranking system, so there wasn't a million different avatars to look at, simple emoticons (they weren't animated like some of phpBB's are), you weren't allowed to have any images in your signature.. when we switched to phpBB, the signature thing was opened right up, and people were abusing it with large images. Nobody wants to scroll through somebody's flashy signature to find the conversations.
But I guess the old GR is fading along with the users.. now it's all new people who want GR to look like every other forum on the internet, the old school farts like me who don't like change are a dying breed.