Today's subject: Post Styles.

Because Gaia Online continues to be made of fail and I want to archive my ranting somewhere.

For those of you who don't suffer from Gaia to the same extent that I do, a Post Style is a forum post which has a lot of junk and jpegs dumped around the edges of the actual content, in the mistaken belief that this will somehow make the post look pretty and interesting, and the post's creator look like a special little snowflake. Because, actually having something interesting to say is so nineteen nineties.

I'm not alone in finding these things annoying, and definitely not when users... well, use them again and again and abloodygain on the same damn page because God forbid that the rest of the site doesn't see their damn avatar art five times a page. They're a veritable triumph of style over substance, which on a discussion forum is a bit of a problem and a bit of a pity.

Today's rant is a revised, reordered and slightly expanded version of a few posts I recently made to a Site Feedback thread with the rather self-explanatory title of Forbidding Huge Post Styles. And it should be pretty obvious from the thread title what the OP thought on the matter - largely the same thing, it turns out, that I do. Decorating your post is all well and good: if you feel you have to, that's your lookout. But - big but - there really, really need to be limits on how much clutter you can throw into your posts just because you think it 'looks pretty' before someone out there tells you to Cut That Shit Out.

The thread itself is actually a pretty entertaining read. Did you know that a subsection of Gaia roleplayers seem to seriously believe they need these huge-ass post formats because otherwise they'll wither and die?

For what it's worth, I don't hate all post styles. I've seen some I find very appealing - but mostly these have been small, discreet, and don't detract from the actual substance of the user's post, which is what I'm interested in, not their avatar artwork or the lyrics of their current favorite song. I don't use a post style myself, but if I could find images that were small (50px by 50px or less), discreet and actually really appealed to me as a person, then I might consider downloading a toolbar and starting. So no, I don't think all post styles are evil and should be banned. I just think there should be clearly defined limits in line with the clearly defined limits for signature content, and I will question quite how necessary they are most of the time. Seriously, were the Hikaru Utada lyrics and the three (count 'em!) pictures of 'OCs' model really necessary to the substance of this post?


Because if you want my honest opinion on the matter, I would say No. True, it looks pretty - I won't deny that. Generic, but pretty. A lot of post styles out there do look quite nice, but I come to a forum to read posts and contribute to discussion threads, not to marvel over a whole heap of 'significant' Hikaru Utada lyrics and a fuckton of either kawaii desu animu art or photos of extremely generic Scenesters. If I wanted to do that I'd be browsing Danbooru and Myspace while listening to Distance on repeat.

A little moderation goes a long way.

( Whassamatter, too BIG for you? )

If Jane Q. Hypothetical-Gaian creates an obnoxiously large post style for whatever reason and then uses it repeatedly, she has created a problem for other users whose computers can't handle loading it three times on one page, or who simply don't want to have to play hide-and-seek with the actual content of her post. As Jane Gaian has caused the problem, it seems only fair that she should therefore be the one to take responsibility for solving it, or at the very least making sure she eases it as much as possible. It should not be up to everybody else who might visit a thread she's posted in to go out of their way to make her post legible when she is the one who created the issue in the first place.

Simply, it's unfair of Jane Gaian to expect everyone else to bend over backward to accommodate her desire to look like a beautiful and unique snowflake - or, more accurately, veritable snowstorm of clutterfuckery. It should be her responsibility to make sure her post style is legible and of a reasonable dimension, and she should be the one to carry the can if it isn't: it should not fall to everyone else who sees it to deal with the fact she couldn't be bothered.

And this is all I - and most of the other people who posted in that thread in support of the idea - are asking for. Not a total ban, but a limit on what's acceptable, and some sense that if a user breaks that limit it's their problem to solve, not the rest of the damn site's.