After reading through everything that has been said about the topic over the past few months or so, and discussing it with my parents, and praying and thinking about it for a long time, I have decided that we are changing our avatar system. Again. It has been in flux since the inception of Holy Worlds, and I think I am finally settling on the final version. This will apply to both the Sci-Fi and Fantasy forums.

There will be no uploading of avatars any more. We will go back to the gallery.

However, we will make it easy for people to get their own avatars into the gallery. We will set up folders in the Holy Worlds Development Folder in Google Docs for people to freely upload avatars for the two forums into. We will assign Marcher Lords to monitor these folders so that they will see new avatars almost immediately. They will then upload them into the appropriate gallery if they fit with the criteria.

The criteria are simple.

1) All avatars should glorify God. If something would be inappropriate to post in the forums, it is inappropriate to post graphically as an avatar.

2) No humanoid forms. Period. That means no android robots, no knights in armor, no men, no girls, no elves, no dwarves, no nothing. The only part of a human that you are permitted to include in an avatar is a human hand or a human eye.

3) No animations or clip art (meaning flat, cartoony art).

4) Avatars must fit within an abstract, medieval essence, maintaining a low key profile in the site. They should not be distracting.

5) No promotions of other sites, unless approved specifically by me.

6) Avatars should be in png, jpg, or gif format.

Final say goes to me, if there is disagreement among the Marcher Lords about whether an avatar fits these criteria. All currently uploaded avatars will be removed, reviewed, and where appropriate, uploaded to the gallery.

This is the decision I am making, and I am asking that you support me in it.

A note: the Marcher Lords who are assigned to upload the avatars will have to get an account with nearlyfreespeech.net (it is free, don't worry), and be given ssh and sftp access to the site. This is a huge responsibility, and so they will have to be at least reasonably familiar with those tools. Any volunteers?

I'm not familiar with those tools, so I would probably not be the person you'd want to volunteer, however, I do fully support your decision and am grateful this will no longer be something that consumes a significant amount of ML energy. I think dealing with this issue will allow us to continue directing our thoughts towards the further meant of the site.

Bravo! A very wise decision!

Unfortunately I know nothing at all about ssh or sftp. I would have loved to help with the avatar monitoring.

How are we going to do the change? Will we do a mass deletion of everyone's avatars, or will it just automatically delete the uploaded avatars when you change the site's settings?

Not familiar with those tools but I'd be willing to learn if you could point me in the right direction.

I will have to migrate them manually.

If you use a command line you should be good enough, haha.

I was going to say I'm not familiar with those tools either, but I am familiar with the use of a command line.

That sounds good. Drop me an email or meet me on gchat and we shall see if that will work.

I'd be happy to help, but I'm not familiar with those either. But I support you and think that was a good choice. So we submit our avatars through the marcher lords in charge of uploading them then?

I'm glad you worked this out, and I too support your decision.

Thanks.

Yup, that is the plan.

Ok. And could I as a Marcher Lord upload my own avatar, or do I need to go through one of the other Marcher Lord's in charge of that?

Hehe... Jay's e-mail has revealed avatar uploading to be a long, involved, highly technical process. So unless you are one of the Marcher Lords who can upload avatars you'll probably have to go through a Marcher Lord in charge of uploading avatars.



Actually, I thought they were going to submit their avatars via the avatar submission gallery?

Submitting through the avatar submission gallery and submitting them through the marcher lords in charge of uploading them is the same thing.

Good job, brother. I was thinking that was what needed to happen.

Thanks sister. I appreciate it.