option to turn off the display of users' pfp and other things

zassou · March 20, 2020

so, i want to turn off the display of profile picture or avatar. and it's a pretty quirky thing that probably most ppl find it weird and first-world-problem-y, but please hear me out, if you will.

i often put off by some forum members' pfp/avatar, when i trying to write something: partly because i don't like certain style of gif, especially the moving kind, i think this applys to a lot of ppl too.

the real issue is, i have problem looking at faces, especially those are looking straight at me, it's called scopophobia, fear of being stare at.

often i feel somewhat uneasy when someone is looking at me irl, and i try to avoid eye contact as well. i often turn my head away when watching a video, especially the talking head kind, eg techquickie, when linus staring at the camera, i will turn my focus away. but this is much minor compared to static portraits.

but that's nonsense compared to the real reason, when i dislike a person's pfp, i will less likely to compose a serious reply to them, and makes me wanna block them, which is kinda abusing the system -- blocking someone only because you dont like their pfp choice is silly. and i don't really want to use adblock on pfp too, because that probably wont work in the long run(as web cache updates), and its not working on phones too as i use a vpn-ish software 24/7.

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other than that, these are things for improving general readability:

1. toggle the display of badges, and titles; but not moderator text etc.

2. i like the alternating bg colour in thread list, i hope it can apply to replys as well

3. ability to adjust text size w/o zooming, one thing i hate old school forums is how small the text sizes are. as they are designed for crt era's sub 20" monitors and not much changes are made as displays getting bigger and wider.

LogicalDrm · March 20, 2020

So you are basicly looking for minimalistic forum theme.

To 3rd, thats up to your browser and OS settings. It would make very little sense to change it within forum. Would mess up things with custom font sizing too.

colonel_mortis · March 20, 2020

Supporting any sort of toggling or configuration would require a fair amount of work, so I'm afraid it's not something that will happen unless a lot of people want it (and I don't think that is the case). If you know (or are willing to learn) CSS, you could probably make a user style to achieve what you're looking for though.