Why can't we upload our own avatars?

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Doesn't seem to be an issue with other sites that allow uploading. Perhaps a strict "if you get seen with it, you get banned" would handle the issue.

Gorbacz wrote:

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Doesn't seem to be an issue with other sites that allow uploading. Perhaps a strict "if you get seen with it, you get banned" would handle the issue.

Paizo's moderation staff (who aren't full-time moderators, this is just a part of their job) have enough work deleting my posts and kicking around jerks as it is.

I'd prefer for them to spend time kicking jerks instead of wondering if the sentence in Polish that I uploaded as my avatar is a grave insult to somebody's sexuality.

Uploading avatars works if you a running a no-profit website OR you have a dedicated OCD full-time lemming Nazi squad out there to hound every violation of your policies. Since column A isn't applicable and column B is not really an option, we gotta live with the current system.

Gorbacz wrote:

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Doesn't seem to be an issue with other sites that allow uploading. Perhaps a strict "if you get seen with it, you get banned" would handle the issue.

Paizo has a set look they want for their site. Custom Avatars and signatures are not part of it.

It helps avoid things like copyrighted pictures that are not approved from being added and such.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

Gorbacz wrote:

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Doesn't seem to be an issue with other sites that allow uploading. Perhaps a strict "if you get seen with it, you get banned" would handle the issue.

Paizo has a set look they want for their site. Custom Avatars and signatures are not part of it.

It helps avoid things like copyrighted pictures that are not approved from being added and such.

Yeah, that too. I can imagine a field day that WotC lawyers would have if custom avatars were allowed.

Custom avatars have been on the todo list since 2004, which may give you some idea of how likely we are to actually implement the feature anytime soon. The reasons mentioned above are pretty much why we don't, though I guess I'd add that anytime you add more moving parts to a website, especially parts that accept unknown files from untrusted sources, the more likely it is that something might break.

I'd just settle for you giving me my own custom zombie smurf avatar, PMG.

Pretty please!

All that plus graphics files can be attack vectors into computers so you likely need to run a virus scanner or something similar as well.

This seems pretty absurd. It would be nice to have a process even it was a huge waiting list. Kinda weird that there is no "When we have time to moderate them" pile we can send out images to.

I'm an artist who would love to do custom avatars for my entire play group and NPC's but we are somewhat kneecapped here.

You could cut down on abuses by making account wide submission limits. Like you can only submit one avatar a month.

I know you guys got a lot to do. Trust me, I know. I run a website for 2 local TV affiliates and having to grind through submission moderation is no fun but the benefits could start to outweigh the costs.

You could claim rights to images submitted and if it fits your style (The current avatars do have a wide range of style in them)then you can add it to your current list.

Gorbacz wrote:

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I assume there is a reason, but I don't know what it is. Is it on the to-do list of things to be implemented?

Moderators not quite up to spending hours chasing after every person who uses a [REDACTED] as an avatar, I believe.

Doesn't seem to be an issue with other sites that allow uploading. Perhaps a strict "if you get seen with it, you get banned" would handle the issue.

It's not the only issue. There's also a security issue as well and remember unlike most messageboards, this one is also a commercial store as well.

I would say mainly because a lot of us are pretty terrible people

This seems pretty absurd. It would be nice to have a process even it was a huge waiting list. Kinda weird that there is no "When we have time to moderate them" pile we can send out images to.

I'm an artist who would love to do custom avatars for my entire play group and NPC's but we are somewhat kneecapped here.

You could cut down on abuses by making account wide submission limits. Like you can only submit one avatar a month.

I know you guys got a lot to do. Trust me, I know. I run a website for 2 local TV affiliates and having to grind through submission moderation is no fun but the benefits could start to outweigh the costs.

You could claim rights to images submitted and if it fits your style (The current avatars do have a wide range of style in them)then you can add it to your current list.

And what if those images are subject to rights in the first place? If you think that verifying 10.000 100x100 px images to see if they do violate an existing IP is something that can be done easily, you're quite mistaken.

The security issue is a joke. It's just a matter of only accepting particular formats.

Oh and like any message board is not capable of incredible copyright infringement with pure text?

We all agreed to terms of service, it's on us and the website will get a warning before something happens.

I also doubt that it will be 10,000 uploads especially if there are limits. Take any idea and keep pushing it to its extreme and it will sound absurd.

IP isn't an issue.

Custom avatars for PbB was one of the main reasons I finally decided to just setup a site of my own and hire a programmer to code a dice roller I liked. Nothing says you can't post a recruitment thread here and then run the game wherever else you see fit...

Oh and like any message board is not capable of incredible copyright infringement with pure text?

IP isn't an issue.

Sure, a messageboard is capable of incredible copyright infringement if somebody copy-pastes wall of text taken straight out of a book. But that's far easier to detect than in case of art.

Imagine the scenario: you are a US-based company with a messageboard. People upload avatars that violate IP of your direct competitor. Say, 100 pieces of art. Your competitor shoots off a lawsuit claiming 1m USD in damages. Is that lawsuit absurd? Maybe. Do you need a lawyer to defend efficiently? Yes. How much will the lawyer ask for if the lawsuit is at 1m? 10% sounds fair, doesn't it? Pay up 100k USD just because you let people upload stuff of their own choosing. /golfclap

Come on Gorbacz.

If such an issue came up then Paizo would receive a removal notice. Much like how it works with Youtube. If a user violates your ToS they are generally responsible for the infringement as long as the website follows DMCA "Safe Harbor" procedures.

Paizo would be told exactly what was in volation and why. Then you could simply remove it and ban the offending party if need be.

You use large numbers to make this out to be more of a problem then it would be. I doubt the amount of submission would reach anything like what you are pointing out and most observers would be able to easily pick out obvious offenses.

I have never herd of a case ever being brought forth for forum avatars even under the most egregious violations. Most forums with open door policies never encounter this problem. This isn't even a paid forum so the chances drop even more.

Custom avatars for PbB was one of the main reasons I finally decided to just setup a site of my own and hire a programmer to code a dice roller I liked. Nothing says you can't post a recruitment thread here and then run the game wherever else you see fit...

Hope he didn't charge you too much because that is super basic PhP, stuff you could probably find under creative commons to use.

Though I don't subscribe to the "If you don't like it then just leave." because it's an easy change that unlocks further creativity.

I think that a lot of parties have artists for players. Artsy people tend to be drawn to PnP games. This system is one of selecting cookie cutter option that seem contrary to the spirit of the game.

Or you can just not allow uploadable avatars and side-step the entire issue altogether. Taa-daa!

-Skeld

It's not an issue. Can anyone cite a case of this ever happening on a forum?

A case of what ever happening on a forum?

On every forum for every E- or T-rated game that I've worked on, we stopped allowing custom avatars (if we ever allowed) because they were too much trouble for family- and work-friendly forums. No one has time to sort through the obscene/offensive pics, malicious code hidden in gifs, etc., answer the letters from lawyers about copyrighted material, and so on. People's gifs broke our forums more times than I can count.

Extremely high cost for very little (if any) benefit, and not a good use of our time.

Come on Gorbacz.

If such an issue came up then Paizo would receive a removal notice. Much like how it works with Youtube. If a user violates your ToS they are generally responsible for the infringement as long as the website follows DMCA "Safe Harbor" procedures.

Umm, no.

A video IP rights holder has most of the time absolutely no interest in suing YouTube. After all, YT hosts his trailers, behind-the-scenes, fan reviews and a zillion of things that helps him profit. So he's cool with a removal request. He doesn't want to get sour with YT or their owner Google, because that could hurt him far more than it would hurt Google. And Google has not only its in-house legal department, but also mountains of cash reserved for hiring top of the line law firms. So there's a tip of the hat, a video gets removed and everybody is cool, because there's zero financial reason for firing the big guns.

On the other hand, we're talking about direct competitors in one market, where the other party has every possibly imaginable interest to get hold on anything that could possibly factor in strategic litigation. And you really, really, REALLY need to play it safe if you are a relatively small company with no in-house legal department and quite a lot to lose, money-wise. Which Paizo is, at this point.

On the other hand, we're talking about direct competitors in one market, where the other party has every possibly imaginable interest to get hold on anything that could possibly factor in strategic litigation. And you really, really, REALLY need to play it safe if you are a relatively small company with no in-house legal department and quite a lot to lose, money-wise. Which Paizo is, at this point.

I know, right? Somewhere, at this exact moment, an executive at a certain toy-centric megacorporation just started salivating and doesn't know why.

I would say mainly because a lot of us are pretty terrible people

Terrible people? A lot of us? Here? You don't get around the Internet much, do you?

Hope he didn't charge you too much because that is super basic PhP, stuff you could probably find under creative commons to use.

Well, it's simple to find free dice rollers that will evaluate a series of single #d# expressions plus or minus static modifiers. However, those generally have iffy cheat protection or aren't well-integrated with the underlying forum software. I found plenty of such basic plugins for the two forum platforms that had the other features I needed (Simple Machine Forums and MyBB).

However, after being spoiled by Paizo, I was interested in something more robust. It needed to be: cheat-proof, handle the same syntax as Paizo's (i.e. complex dice expressions with modifiers & multiple different dice), handle formatting, allow users to copy the original dice notation and not just the results, be persistent even when editing posts, and yet allow additional rolls to be added to an existing set of rolls. I didn't find a single preexisting plugin or script that came anywhere close to even handling the basics (i.e. complex dice expression and persistence), let alone any of the other features.

Thankfully, I found an excellent coder on the MyBB forums who was able to exceed my expectations at a cost that I felt I was nearly unfair to him. :)

Though I don't subscribe to the "If you don't like it then just leave." because it's an easy change that unlocks further creativity.

I'd love to see Paizo allow custom avatar uploading, even if such avatars/aliases were restricted to just the Online Campaigns area. I'd wager the threat of having your game suspended for violations would make it a self-policing issue.

Even so, there are a few other reasons why a group might want to go it alone on their own site: story content, image embedding, the ability to set your own editing time-limits, the ability to easily start and run multiple threads for the same campaign... There are some pretty big trade-offs though. The time/resources and effort/know-how needed to setup such a site isn't necessarily trivial, and you are also unlikely to have as many readers following along. Still, people do have options if they truly desire them, and that was my main point.

FWIW, one of the agreements I had with my coder was that we make our plugin freely available to the public at some point. If any of you are inclined to pursue such an option using MyBB, then I'd be happy to share it with you. Here are some examples of the message composition interface, and of what the resulting posts look like.

A case of what ever happening on a forum?

On every forum for every E- or T-rated game that I've worked on, we stopped allowing custom avatars (if we ever allowed) because they were too much trouble for family- and work-friendly forums. No one has time to sort through the obscene/offensive pics, malicious code hidden in gifs, etc., answer the letters from lawyers about copyrighted material, and so on. People's gifs broke our forums more times than I can count.

Extremely high cost for very little (if any) benefit, and not a good use of our time.

I think "high cost" is being a bit overblown. I think we imagine that the number of images submitted would be staggering but the reality would be quite different. Strict limits on submissions solves most problems.

Why would you even allow Gifs if the fist place? I manage a major website and not allowing Gifs seems like a no brainer. Right up there with don't allow .exe files or HTML code.

Can you give a specific example where a lawyer sent a letter about an avatar breaking Copyright law that turned into a court case?

The benefit is the creative interaction between content creators and the players. If I wanted to play a pre-made modular experience then I would play an MMO or "That Other game" Why would you intentionally steer the user experience towards that?

You already have to police for obscene material with content. You even already have a flagging system.

GM Gabboge wrote:

Hope he didn't charge you too much because that is super basic PhP, stuff you could probably find under creative commons to use.

Well, it's simple to find free dice rollers that will evaluate a series of single #d# expressions plus or minus static modifiers. However, those generally have iffy cheat protection or aren't well-integrated with the underlying forum software. I found plenty of such basic plugins for the two forum platforms that had the other features I needed (Simple Machine Forums and MyBB).

However, after being spoiled by Paizo, I was interested in something more robust. It needed to be: cheat-proof, handle the same syntax as Paizo's (i.e. complex dice expressions with modifiers & multiple different dice), handle formatting, allow users to copy the original dice notation and not just the results, be persistent even when editing posts, and yet allow additional rolls to be added to an existing set of rolls. I didn't find a single preexisting plugin or script that came anywhere close to even handling the basics (i.e. complex dice expression and persistence), let alone any of the other features.

Thankfully, I found an excellent coder on the MyBB forums who was able to exceed my expectations at a cost that I felt I was nearly unfair to him. :)

GM Gabboge wrote:

Though I don't subscribe to the "If you don't like it then just leave." because it's an easy change that unlocks further creativity.

I'd love to see Paizo allow custom avatar uploading, even if such avatars/aliases were restricted to just the Online Campaigns area. I'd wager the threat of having your game suspended for violations would make it a self-policing issue.

Even so, there are a few other reasons why a group might want to go it alone on their own site: story content, image embedding, the ability to set your own editing time-limits, the ability to easily start and run multiple threads for the same campaign... There are...

Ah well I see now. That would take a bit of doing. And good for you on opening it up. Though you could always consider a Creative Common license. It seems like the best of both worlds.

Man your coder did do it for cheap! Good to him. I was always more of a front-end guy myself who fell into back-end work as a career so I have an idea of the amount of hours he had to place into it.

I never even though of having game-wide consequences. That's pretty brilliant.

I don't see the benefit, really. Yeah, I get it that it's cool and awesome to "express yourself", but it'd suit me fine if you (nobody in particular, just "you" plural) just keep that to Facebook, so I can keep ignoring it.

Here you have a beautiful selection of Paizo art to choose from. That seems very reasonable. Just like this forum not having signatures, I think the lack of random crap being used as avatars is a benefit.

Yes, I do have other fora where I use custom avatars. Yes, I think it's cool. Yes, I have seen some things I wish I hadn't seen. I don't consider myself hypocritical to use the function where it's already offered, but if I got a vote it'd be disabled world-wide.

The security issue is a joke. It's just a matter of only accepting particular formats.

You really have no idea how easy it is to embed something nasty in just about any format that you'd reasonably let people use.

GM Gabboge wrote:

The security issue is a joke. It's just a matter of only accepting particular formats.

You really have no idea how easy it is to embed something nasty in just about any format that you'd reasonably let people use.

Please extrapolate on this topic.

As far as I know there are no Jpeg viruses that can attack forums by simply displaying. So far I have seen Jpegs that can act as "Triggers" for a virus that is already on your computer or one that may have a virus that open through a specific program, I have yet to see it happen through a non-infected browser.

http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/

Please extrapolate on this topic.

As far as I know there are no Jpeg viruses that can attack forums by simply displaying. So far I have seen Jpegs that can act as "Triggers" for a virus that is already on your computer or one that may have a virus that open through a specific program, I have yet to see it happen through a non-infected browser.

http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/

You can change the header information in a script to return it as a JPG, PNG, or any sort of thing really, or tell your webserver to run certain file types through a scripting engine (such as PHP).

Paizo has a HUGE selection of avatars that they have worked very hard to make searchable and indexable. And it only ever gets bigger.

Allowing people to upload their own avatars introduces a lot of complications, many of which have been discussed in this thread.

1) Uploads would have to be moderated, either before display or after-the-fact. This requires employee time and moderation tools. And it would require looking at things most people don't want to see. Reviewing images for 'adult content' is a job that comes with mandatory visits to a therapist at a lot of places.

The security issue is a joke. It's just a matter of only accepting particular formats.

Right, because no one ever got a virus from a file that had the extension changed.

2) Even with pre-moderation, something will slip through (for instance, animated gifs with 5-minute first frames, that change into something NSFW.) This means there have to be tools for removing avatars, and more moderation/customer service time to deal with it.

3) It opens Paizo up to problems with IP. The DMCA provides certain protections here, but someone would still have to deal with notices. See #2.
3a) Outside of the risks of a lawsuit, keep in mind that Paizo is a company that relies on its IP to be profitable. This means they are expected to play by the rules in turn.

4) Most of the avatars come from Pathfinder products, with consistent art guidelines: this gives the Paizo forums a certain consistent look. Allowing avatars from outside sources would disrupt that look: even assuming garish/NSFW/Animated/Meme images are banned, imagine a big yellow smiley-face next to this post. It doesn't fit.

And what problem is all this to fix? Because a few PbP games actually commissioned an artist to draw their characters? Host the image elsewhere and link to it, so the players can all see it.

For every person who has commissioned art, there are 5 who just want to display an image owned by someone else (I recall an old PbP forum where 50% of the user uploaded avatars were from Baldur's Gate or the covers of Forgotten Realms books), 10 who just want to troll other messageboard users, and 20 who just want to try to show how 'cool' they are with a weird avatar.

Ah well I see now. That would take a bit of doing. And good for you on opening it up. Though you could always consider a Creative Common license. It seems like the best of both worlds.

That's not a bad idea, that or an as-is GNU license of some sort, perhaps. :)

Man your coder did do it for cheap! Good to him. I was always more of a front-end guy myself who fell into back-end work as a career so I have an idea of the amount of hours he had to place into it.

Hehe, I'm a sys admin for a living, but I never had much patience for coding. Thankfully, what experience I do have simplified the communication of requirements and speeded troubleshooting. ;)

I never even though of having game-wide consequences. That's pretty brilliant.

Thanks! Sadly, just after we finished all the work my life went crazy (new GF, unexpected lay-off, job-hunting, new job, moving...) so the game's sort of fallen by the wayside. It's a new year though, so hopefully I'll be able to make time for a reboot and put some of the new theories to work.

Can you give a specific example where a lawyer sent a letter about an avatar breaking Copyright law that turned into a court case?

There's always a first court case: By definition, someone was first. A better way to phrase this question would be "What does your lawyer say about this situation?"

What you might not know is that Gorbacz actually is a lawyer. Now, he's Polish, so I don't know if the Intellectual Property landscape is quite the same, but maybe you should slow down and consider that he might know what he's saying instead of asking other people to disprove your assertions that such things would be easy, cheap, or simple as you seem to think.

I know you guys got a lot to do. Trust me, I know. I run a website for 2 local TV affiliates and having to grind through submission moderation is no fun but the benefits could start to outweigh the costs.

What benefits are those?

Jessica Price wrote:

A case of what ever happening on a forum?

On every forum for every E- or T-rated game that I've worked on, we stopped allowing custom avatars (if we ever allowed) because they were too much trouble for family- and work-friendly forums. No one has time to sort through the obscene/offensive pics, malicious code hidden in gifs, etc., answer the letters from lawyers about copyrighted material, and so on. People's gifs broke our forums more times than I can count.

Extremely high cost for very little (if any) benefit, and not a good use of our time.

I think "high cost" is being a bit overblown. I think we imagine that the number of images submitted would be staggering but the reality would be quite different. Strict limits on submissions solves most problems.

I'm not "imagining" anything. I'm speaking from over a decade of experience of community management, for communities ranging from Microsoft Games Studios to grassroots-run forums. It was massively time-consuming, and something I have since advocated against, and will continue to advocate against, especially here at Paizo where we don't have anyone whose sole job is moderation. Not a good use of our time.

The primary purpose of avatars in a text-heavy forum like this one is to make threads easily visually parsible as to who said what. Pregenerated avatars serve that purpose just fine, and I've yet to see anyone provide any compelling examples of any benefits that even approach the cost.

1) Uploads would have to be moderated, either before display or after-the-fact. This requires employee time and moderation tools. And it would require looking at things most people don't want to see. Reviewing images for 'adult content' is a job that comes with mandatory visits to a therapist at a lot of places.

I think you're speaking in Hyperbole. Modderation can be done at any pace really. Just inform people that they can submit but it may not come back around for a while. This alone will cut your submission way down. Not that I think they would be that bad anyway. I think most people would opt for the easy to use per-built avatar.

2) Even with pre-moderation, something will slip through (for instance, animated gifs with 5-minute first frames, that change into something NSFW.) This means there have to be tools for removing avatars, and more moderation/customer service time to deal with it.

Why do people keep using Gifs as an example? Are there really many forums out there still stupid enough to allow them?

3) It opens Paizo up to problems with IP. The DMCA provides certain protections here, but someone would still have to deal with notices. See #2.

3a) Outside of the risks of a lawsuit, keep in mind that Paizo is a company that relies on its IP to be profitable. This means they are expected to play by the rules in turn.

....What a vague statement. Do you seriously think there would be an industry uproar of the avatars on a forum that no one is paying to be on? Like I said, I have yet to see an example of this.

4) Most of the avatars come from Pathfinder products, with consistent art guidelines: this gives the Paizo forums a certain consistent look. Allowing avatars from outside sources would disrupt that look: even assuming garish/NSFW/Animated/Meme images are banned, imagine a big yellow smiley-face next to this post. It doesn't fit.

Other then pastelly colors can you really find a great consensus of style. Oh yes, all the good ones tend to come from a few artists but there are a lot of ...not-so-good ones that veers wildly from this set style.

What you might not know is that Gorbacz actually is a lawyer. Now, he's Polish, so I don't know if the Intellectual Property landscape is quite the same, but maybe you should slow down and consider that he might know what he's saying instead of asking other people to disprove your assertions that such things would be easy, cheap, or simple as you seem to think.

Do I need to point out exactly how different US copyright law is? Our very definition of copyright is fundamentally different then most other nations. America is kind of an odd ball in this arena.

I think my points have been stated much clearly then vagaries of "Anything can be made a virus" and "Paizo is a company that relies on its IP to be profitable. This means they are expected to play by the rules in turn." I quoted the term DMCA "Safe Harbor" to help provide you a way to find the information. Do you want links? I have posted some up above but perhaps I should have to spell everything out blatantly.

I am challenging the website policy not proposing a theory, burden of proof is shared and pushing it all onto one party to prove is a lazy-mans approach.

GM Gabboge wrote:

Jessica Price wrote:

A case of what ever happening on a forum?

On every forum for every E- or T-rated game that I've worked on, we stopped allowing custom avatars (if we ever allowed) because they were too much trouble for family- and work-friendly forums. No one has time to sort through the obscene/offensive pics, malicious code hidden in gifs, etc., answer the letters from lawyers about copyrighted material, and so on. People's gifs broke our forums more times than I can count.

Extremely high cost for very little (if any) benefit, and not a good use of our time.

I think "high cost" is being a bit overblown. I think we imagine that the number of images submitted would be staggering but the reality would be quite different. Strict limits on submissions solves most problems.

I'm not "imagining" anything. I'm speaking from over a decade of experience of community management, for communities ranging from Microsoft Games Studios to grassroots-run forums. It was massively time-consuming, and something I have since advocated against, and will continue to advocate against, especially here at Paizo where we don't have anyone whose sole job is moderation. Not a good use of our time.

The primary purpose of avatars in a text-heavy forum like this one is to make threads easily visually parsible as to who said what. Pregenerated avatars serve that purpose just fine, and I've yet to see anyone provide any compelling examples of any benefits that even approach the cost.

So we could always just have a flat color as someones avatar or just a specific pattern for it? Those would make due and could be procedurally generated. I see that the purpose is to simply help association and not to enhance the immersion of the user. </sarcasm>

I'm sorry but I feel like that explanation doesn't make a lot of sense. The avatars are there to represent, in order to increase immersion. The evidence is how many of them there are to choose. Why are there more then one white male face? Why make a warrior variant? Wouldn't you want to avoid showing class in order to make each one more acceptable to any player? You make specific one's for immersions sake

So we could always just have a flat color as someones avatar or just a specific pattern for it? Those would make due and could be procedurally generated.

I'd be fine with that. Of course, I don't have to be since we already have a perfectly serviceable system in place that requires minimum maintenance.

I don't find the benefit of 'increased immersion' to outweigh the added costs.

To speak to the point of moderation and timing, if we were to hypothetically allow uploading of custom avatars right now: we'd rather not have community members wait an indefinite amount of time for their special thing. This could cause frustration that we'd rather our users not experience. As a general rule for moderation, we also tend to try to address moderation issues in a timely fashion (often addressing these issues multiple times throughout a given day, or in the case of some employees, who monitor the site on our own time during evenings or weekends). Our community is fast moving and ever growing, and letting these things wait can be detrimental to our ability to keep our community as friendly and inviting as we are able.

Additional avatars are added to the pool (which is growing to close to 3,000 in number, last I checked) as often as I can manage. Avatars created since I took over their management have been selected based on a set of criteria (such as clarity, detail, scalability, adherence to messageboard rules, and so on). I can't speak to the point on whether we'll even allow for custom avatar uploads at some point in the future, but as Gary has indicated, it's unlikely to be soon.

Sorry, I don't get why this is a big issue. There are hundreds of choices already available. It is just a picture. I would think that it would be more important to have Paizo employees focussing on making more of the products we love then to spend more resources to make sure everyone gets to have their "special snowflake" avatar. Paizo doesn't make its money off its forums anyway, so why would they do it?

GM Gabboge wrote:

Can you give a specific example where a lawyer sent a letter about an avatar breaking Copyright law that turned into a court case?

There's always a first court case: By definition, someone was first. A better way to phrase this question would be "What does your lawyer say about this situation?"

What you might not know is that Gorbacz actually is a lawyer. Now, he's Polish, so I don't know if the Intellectual Property landscape is quite the same, but maybe you should slow down and consider that he might know what he's saying instead of asking other people to disprove your assertions that such things would be easy, cheap, or simple as you seem to think.

The landscape is different enough so that if Paizo was in an European jurisdiction, I wouldn't even bother to argue.

But, we're talking US jurisdiction, and it's a different ball game. Now I'm no expert on US law, but I did brush with it often enough to realize that you really need to be careful, because over there litigation is a weapon, and you don't want to feed your opponents ammo.

Removed a couple posts. This topic really shouldn't be this heated, let's tone down the back and forth please.

I've already changed my avatar twice because it became too popular. But if there are that many new avatars, maybe it's time to go shopping again...

Removed a couple posts. This topic really shouldn't be this heated, let's tone down the back and forth please.

Oh Chris. I just went to get some popcorn and come back and you have removed all the good stuff.

snicker..... just kidding....

-- david