Hello users of Hexbear, there have been many changes and some drama the past few months.
The recent changes we've been making have been an attempt to create a more safe and welcoming environment for many demographics that have been overlooked in the past.
For any of our comrades that have been unintentionally hurt in this process, we apologise and hope to find a solution that accommodates as many people as possible while still meeting the needs of the marginalised groups who need a space like this the most.
The intent of this post is to provide a space for all users to air grievances with regard to the site. As well as provide suggestions for specific things that could be changed to address your grievance. Comments insulting the mod team or those without a specific means to address your problem may be removed. No commenter will be sitebanned, unless it clearly breaks the code of conduct.
Please ban animated avatar images. They drive me fucking nuts. Its so so obnoxious. Every post that has one is inherently annoying and makes me dislike the accounts/people associated with them. Its so rude.
Don't know about the website itself but on the app jerboa you can disable gifs auto playing
Hey that's true I never noticed it applied to avis as well! Thanks. :) If only I could apply this to the whole internet.
In the old days (Netscape Navigator) you could press
control/cmd+.to stop animations on a page. This feature has been taken away from modern web browsers and there is no way to prevent animations from loading/playing that I have found. I tried to write a user style, find a browser extension, whatever, but it's impossible as far as I can tell. Especially if you would like to be able to selectively play some animations on an opt-in basis.Although I did just now have a flash of brilliance and figure out a solution that appears works in this context only. Create a ublock origin rule for the specific user avis that have animations. Since there isn't that many of them it shouldn't be too much trouble to do it manually.
In a round about way, complaining has worked.
Looked into it a little bit, but could using something like
||https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/*.gif$imagwork? Haven't used ublock in a while so unsure if it would work. Would also disable all gods tho not just avatarsHey now, they took away our animated avatars everywhere else, cant we have ONE space?
I doubt I will prevail.
God you avi is so fucking annoying.
~~What's annoying about them? I hardly notice them myself~~
Self Crit: my experience has nothing to do with the validity of others' experiences. Nobody has to explain to me why they prices things differently.
It's really distracting when I'm trying to read something and there is a bunch of stuff moving around on screen. I have to block every gif avatar with Ublock.
I also block the gif emotes too.
Rereading my comment I see that it's pretty dismissive of users with different sensory processing types. I'm going to edit it
It's all good! I thought it was an okay question.
I don't love the emotes but neither do I hate them. because they tend to get all clumped together in a jokey sub thread so easy to ignore. The avis are mixed in with blocks of text in a way that makes them really difficult to scroll off screen. I don't kniow why I never thought of using ublock earlier, I tried much more ellaboiarte solutions previously.
Well that's nice of you to fix it. :) but how will you learn if you don't ask? I'm glad someone else answered you. This whole "it's not my job to educate others" thing can get to be a bit overblown sometimes. Like it's not anyone's job to post here on any topic.
Obviously lots of people are feeling the same way as you do, because otherwise animations would never be used.
I wouldn't really want animations to be banned, because people enjoy them so much. And I just figured out out to use ublock on them, that'll work fine probably.
I apologize for my previous dismissive reply. It wasn't productive. Just adding a separate reply so you get a ping.