Avatars, sigs, pictures off?

Do you ever browse forums with avatars, sigs and pictures in posts off? I do quite often, I tend to block avatars with adblock plus rather than in the usercp. I find some sites seem to load quicker with them blocked, I just enabled them here at AA for a moment there and wow it looked much more colourful

On our forums I have to keep them enabled as there are of course rules that go along with avatars, signatures and pictures etc

I cant imagine many using the feature within the usercp or blocking them themselves. What do you reckon about having them off? Do you think it effects the forum experience?

Avatars etc can sometimes be distracting and images can affect your judgement just how we judge people in person at least thats what I find about them.

 

I dont block them, but I do have members on 56k connections, so I created a usergroup (opt in) for them which has no avvies or sigs enabled , I may make a 56k fast loading skin too..

 

That is a pretty good idea to cater for those on slower conns. I dont really have a connection problem myself but when a forum loads fast and still looks appealing thats a big plus.

 

Interesting. I didn't even know that we could (or why we would) do that.

Any other suggestions for running a "lite" version of a forum/site?

 

A good idea would be to take your current forums style, add a child style and remove all the images from the CSS and any really not needed inline images too, might look like a skeleton but heck it loads like a whippet

 

Simply direct them to the archives skin.

 

My archive redirects to the thread itself instead of an archived version of the thread.

 

@^ You can change that option in the AdminCP

 

It's a sitemap

 

Still has the content. Correct? :p

 

I suppose

 

Gotcha

 

Umm, no, but I make the skin as connection aware as possible, I can't ignore it anyways, I have a crappy BPN connection.