What is the point of "message icon"? Just what is the point?

On each post or reply you can choose a message icon:

What is the point? Honestly?

When I'm looking at the threads (in Programming Questions, say) I just totally ignore the message icons because I have no idea what they mean.

An example: What is a "cheesy" message? Or a "wink" message? Or an "angry" one?

This is just wasting screen space, server time, download time (for the icons), wasting a whole lot of stuff for absolutely no point, as far as I can see.

Are there any guidelines? Do you use a "sad" icon if your program crashed? Or maybe an "angry" one?

And "lamp"? When do you use "lamp"? When a light comes on in your brain?

How did this get past user interface testing? Did no-one ask: "do we really need these?".

And as for the scrolling marquee (move) bbcode, did no-one ask: "is this a good idea?".

Someone might usefully have asked the same questions of the guy who invented the smart phone, IPad, Twitter, Facebook ...

There is an unfortunate and very widespread human tendency to assume that we should, just because we can. And computers make these silly things possible at very little cost.

I am 62 going on 63 and I now make a habit (in this sort of situation) of telling myself that these sort of things are as "normal" for 15-year-olds as books were for us at that age and I'm just out of touch. Unfortunately when I was young I thought the world belonged to my parents. Now I know it belongs to the grand-children.

...R

I think i know why it's there:
Other forum software has the same gimmick.
There you select a radio button next to that icon, here you need to pick an item from the drop down menu.
The icon will appear next to the topic or reply title.
I've used it sometimes on another forum, but wouldn't miss it when it's gone.

The lamp is indeed used when you just had a bright moment, but the lamp over here seems to be off...
I don't think this is worth the time to spend in it to get rid of it.

Certainly its something which can save that wee bit 'o' bandwidth if removed ( gigabytes in the long run ). However it doesn't really bother me, I take little notice of the icons, the only bits I look out for is the little person () signifying I participated in a thread.

What I would like to see is clearer control sets. Instead of a silly icon, I would rather see a text label like: 'Insert Code'. I'd imagine this would result in more newbies posting using [code] tags.

I always wondered what the icons at the left of the list of threads represented and how they got there.

It looks like the message icon chosen by the originator of the thread shows up there as well as on the individual post.

I guess it would be too much to expect to be able to easily find some sort of documentation to explain all of this.

Don

They are used in many forums for quickly identifying some class of posts. If you do not want them we can disable the feature.

I don't think this is worth the time to spend in it to get rid of it.

It is probably worth the time if it will also get rid of the option to create a poll (which it appears to be able to do).

Don

Certainly its something which can save that wee bit 'o' bandwidth if removed

It's not only the bandwidth that is of concern but it is the technique by which items such as this are obtained for use on the displayed page.

Those of us using a satellite based ISP now have decent download speeds but we still have to deal with bandwidth and latency limitations. The bandwidth limitations will probably go away in the future. The latency will not go away as long as geostationary satellites are used.

I'm not sure how all of this works but my observation has been that the more complicated pages, especially those that retrieve items from other places, take an inordinately long time to load compared to those consisting solely of simple text and graphics. My hunch is that at least some of this time is due to the latency - perhaps the actual request for some of these items is coming from my computer as the page loads.

This really adds up on many glitzy webpages making the page load times seem comparable to those of the old dial-up days. There is no excuse for this kind of performance on what is essentially a text based forum but it looks like that is where we are headed.

Don

mastrolinux:
They are used in many forums for quickly identifying some class of posts. If you do not want them we can disable the feature.

I never use them. As far as I can tell a newbie poster will choose one to try to draw attention to his/her post (as well as adding ALL CAPS and "help me pleeeeaasssee!!!!" to the subject line).

mastrolinux:
They are used in many forums for quickly identifying some class of posts. If you do not want them we can disable the feature.

Please do.

They are used in many forums for quickly identifying some class of posts. If you do not want them we can disable the feature.

They are not used that way in this forum so why keep them?

Don