Forum Moderators: open
The rest just seem to be on a clutter drive - just how many icons can we cram onto the screen in one page; just how slow can we make the page load! It's unbelievable!
Whoever invented animated smilies should be taken away quietly and shot.
Coming back to WebmasterWorld is like a breath of fresh air after browsing some of the big forums out there!
I wholy agree with Nick and his thoughts on avatars. Especially those awful animated ones, and the anime ones with blinking eyes etc.
Just as bad are signatures on message boards with a 500x400 pixel animated image or family photo tacked on the bottom! Mainly why I don't allow either avatars or image sigs on my message board, except for a couple quite understated avatars to identify admins and mods.
And on one competitor's message boards, they have no restrictions on signatures (yes, another message board pet peeve of mine!) - one girl has a 27 line signature, complete with colors, bold and italics. Too bad most of her posts are only about two lines long.
I have my own boards set for a max 250 characters in a signature, hehe.