What do all the little icons mean?

[grnidone]

I do not understand what all the little images on this site mean. Can someone fill me in?

In fact, I find all the little pictures to be nothing more than noise, but perhaps that is because I don't understand them.

[St0n3y]

They have no significant meaning other than what you want them to mean. Consider them for entertainment purposes only.

[dannysullivan]

It's a good question, and I've been meaning to find time to document what the icons mean for everyone, so they'd actually be useful. I agree, they can be noise without that.

If you look at the bottom of the home page, you'll see a guide to three major icons to tell you if there are new posts in an area or not. They aren't that useful for the home page but can be more helpful if you're in a particular area, such as here:

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=30

You'll see there one icon not documented is a mail envelope with an arrow in it. That tells you we've moved something from one forum to another.

Another undocumented icon is when there's a poll. It looks like a bunch of bars on a chart, like you'll see at the moment here: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/search.php?searchid=185981

You'll also see another column that has icons such as a yellow warning sign, a happy face, a thumbs up or down or just what looks to be a piece of paper.

When someone starts a thread, they have the ability to associate an icon with that thread, as listed at the bottom of the compose message screen.

The idea as I gather is the forum software wants to let someone assign a visual cue to accompany what they're starting a thread about. Upset at something? You might use a thumbs down. Got a question? You might use a question mark.

We currently don't provide any guidelines on what to use. I have the ability to remove these, and perhaps we should. Alternatively, we can have it so that only moderators might be able to set them, which might provide a more consistent guide to when they are used. But that's a lot of work, so it would be more likely that we'd just either let people do what they want, perhaps find a way to give more guidance, or just get rid of them all together.

You can also use the icons when replying to messages. If you don't pick one, it assigns a generic one for you. I've just switched that off, since it doesn't seem to really be adding value. If someone does want to use an icon, they still can, however.

[dannysullivan]

We have a new icon. Many of you are familiar with the member reputation system, where members are rated by other members and gain green bars as they rise (and in a very few cases, may get a red bar if they have overall negative reputation).

You can opt-out of the system using Control Panel, then Edit Options, then untick Show My Reputation box. If you did that in the past, you'd get a black bar which I thought looked negative.

Now you get a no entry sign. Anyone hovering over it will see that you prefer not to publicly show your reputation. Hopefully that will make it clear that you aren't necessarily in "black bar territory" but rather that you just prefer not to take part in the system.

[Robert_Charlton]

More documentation overall on the features of the board would be a great help.

I'd vote for switching off the thumbs up and thumbs down message icons. I can see how the uninitiated might think these are ratings for the thread.

[Elisabeth]

I agree Robert.

I spent some time looking for a "icon" legend like the smilies one the other day & couldn't find one.

interesting comment about the thumbs images - not sure if that's something that can be eliminated by itself, or it all goes off at once.

[Robert_Charlton]

I spent some time looking for a "icon" legend like the smilies one the other day & couldn't find one.

As I'm posting this message, I see that there are text flags that appear when I mouse over icons in the "Post Icons" section. Not sure whether you've just added these, or whether they've always been there.

...interesting comment about the thumbs images - not sure if that's something that can be eliminated by itself, or it all goes off at once.

If they'd all vanish at once, one way possibly to phase them out might be to replace them with a more neutral icon, or just fill the holes with the "Post" icon.

Another approach might be to replace the alt tag or title attribute. "Thumbs down," eg, might replaced by "Critical post" (lamer but clearer... assuming, ie, that anyone bothers to mouse over these).