look, i have a lot of anime avatars and weird and crazy stuff from when i was 12 and now i am more of a minimalist. would be nice to be able to opt out or delete the archive thingy

i think a nice solution wld be the ability to hide avatars you dont want to be public on the profile tab

on the other hand, i like complete archives.

Only reason I would support this feature is because my old account has so many repeats of the same avatars with slight adjustments because there'd always be a mistake I'd make after uploading, lol

avatar archive more like photo book amirite

"see how much I grew up"

i wld like to abuse this thread for a personal rant

why are people so overly sensitive about their past sometimes?
only stupid people look at content from 2012 and judge the person based on that content when there is much newer content from nowadays.
i made a whole bunch of stuff on the internet 10 years ago. a lot of it im not proud of anymore and i can see how much i changed as a person. but that doesnt mean i try to act like it never happend. i neither want it to disppear forever. its still available for people who stumble over it by accident or by stalker-research. because its part of the journey i took to end up where i am right now.
so especially because old content of mine or silly things i did still exist, i can be proud of who i am right now.

it also enhances my sympathy towards a person if i have a little better understanding of where they come from, because otherwise it goes a little more towards the "im a perfect human without flaws"-direction which seems alien to me.
in other words, my sympathy towards someone online naturally and gradually grows based on their existence somewhere.
probably also why i like botb with its long history of different people that much.

^{(edited to clear up some things a little)}
Thanks for putting some of my thoughts into words kleeder.

It's kinda against the atmosphere of BotB to "sweep away footprints", like I can't remove my entries and even the accidental likes I left on somebodys entry, right? It's not a big deal unless it's really causing problems, like law-breaking, fueling toxic or mean behaviour towards the owner of the publish or another person, or similar morality - Then ofc it is to be removed.

@uUni People understand you've changed since then :D

on one hand i agree with kleeder but on the other i certainly do not support the idea that whatever people did online should be archived forever, regardless of where it is

yeah we're going to be a far more mature community about it since we've gone thru the same shit, i personally have, and a lot of it i'm like yeah, i was like that, but things obviously changed (hence why i have links to my old/new accounts on my bios), but some aspects of that i would like to not talk or think about since it's so radically different from who i am today, it's not stuff i agree with, it's stuff that doesn't make me myself, so to speak. is it that unfair to want people to not look at it, even if it was just a few avatars?

and again, we're more mature about it as botbrs and such, but think outside of botb where you could get torn apart for no reason just bc someone slightly dislikes you and finds something they can fuck you up with from the past, and also think outside the internet where most people just forget a lot of what happened as far back as like a week ago in my case, i dont remember what happened apart from "oh i was at work some times and yeah", unless someone brings up something specific then i go "oh yeah that happened"

sorry for the tangent, i'm not disagreeing with kleeder completely cuz i think theyre bringing up fair points that are especially relevant to botb, but there is another side of the coin to consider imo

on topic: i do think the option of hiding avatars should be a thing, and should also be a thing for admins to be able to do in the case of a bad grotesque avatar, bright flashing light one or w/e being used on the site that can be hidden, since that certainly doesnt need to be looked at imo

consider that 1) these little icons we choose to represent ourselves can have very powerful associations inextricably tied to them, based on who made them for us, based on what we remember happening while we used them, or even just based on what they are an image of. it's not far-fetched at all to want to scrub something with foul or even traumatic associations from your profile on this web site.

particularly considering 2) most other websites do not do this avatar archive thing. generally i think until you learn botb saves all your avatars you assume that once you replace it, the old one is gone forever... or at the very least is totally inaccessible unless you had the link. i'm aware the site tries to tell you this with the "thine avatar shalt be safed in botb omnibus" or whatever it says, but i at least looked at that, went "???" and carried on uploading. considering peoples' frequent surprise, i'd say i am not the only one. ANYWAY, the other site with an avatar archive that comes to mind is Facebook. and even Facebook lets you delete those.

ability to hide old avatars is a fine compromise imo

i think ppl should be able to delete avatars. thank you

agree on the hide or delete feature, nothing is permanent and some people are embarrassed or sensitive about their previous selves here. seems simple to empathize with that.

agree w/ bgo that it's normal to have regret and to change and to move on and to want that moving on to be as total as it can comfortably be. that's simple, i consider it self-evident

there are several things that make botb unfriendly to this, and while i'm not interested in being like "suck it up, accept you were awful and everyone can see it", because that's absurd, it's true i think there are limits to what we can expect to be implemented here in terms of right to be forgotten. it is a complex and persistent creative ecosystem, you will make changes you can't expect to have rolled back. i *will* say that if you want a fresh start, there's always the new account button. fresh starts usually require sacrifices worse than pressing that guy, heh. but if you're just having mild shame about being a teen then, like.. yeah, you might have to suck it up, sorry.

botb will never be perfectly comfortable in certain ways, just because of its archival nature, its inherent limitations, and the small amt of time puke has to devote to its upkeep. features that can seem very simple to implement, could take hours (plus now i'm thinking about how the old avatars are used in all those youtube videos already.. agh, it was just supposed to be a neat feature..) so please remain mindful about how crucial to this tiny little webpage your requests are. ppl are maybe a lil spoiled by this modern world of web services, heh, but on the other hand, people are aware of how much more friendly and effective websites can be; you prob didn't see this amt of text coming when you posted this uuni, huh? we got philosophical debates going down

that all said i support deleting avatars lol

honestly i wish there was more i could do to help out with some of the clerical work around here, in terms of helping botbrs get their free 1-time name change (i just made that up, it's not a thing) or whatever. but right now things are how they are

this turned really philosophical lmao

i just wanna say i don't support DELETING but rather hiding, that way it can still be used for videos and can be seen by sysops, but cant immediately be seen by users on botb etc

perhaps if the concern is like oh anyone can see them, we could just make it so that you're level 10 or something to see someones past avatars or whatever, the work required would put off most people looking to do harm imo

but even then, in my case i have some crinch(tm) avatars i'd like to hide from immediate view on my old accounts but would be fine with them being used on videos or whatever else relevant lol, idk im weird in that regard

i get the archival stuff when it comes to music, but it feels like a bizarre extension of that philosophy to have it also apply to avatars.

i think hiding is a step in the right direction but im still not sure why deleting is controversial; the archival thing doesn't really ring as important to me in this regard. feels like a huge cost on the empathy side for a very minor gain for archiving (images on a part of the site that is not critical to the core botb experience in any real way)

i think the strongest argument ive seen against deleting has been the technical lift required and possible issues that would crop up. i don't think I fully understand what those issues are though

avatars being such a small part of what you can't fully control here, is exactly what makes them perfectly emblematic of something to accept as you accept the other things (i'm not arguing we should accept any of them, i'm just pointing that out). puke has been nervous about setting precedents (sorry puke i am divulging/speaking for you a bit) and is tired of the conflicts between the long-functioning central ethos of his site and what everyone is asking for (which happens at regular intervals over the years), especially when you realize work is involved with every one. i can think of like, 5 annoying things off the top of my head that could be different, but botb's more pressing issues (there's other stuff going on, after all..) has been stressing its owner out more than is good.

still with me?

you all should know that you are heard, and measures are being taken regarding the avatar archive (and possibly some other stuff as well)!

Completely different perspective that is unrelated to philosophy of one's past:

I think at the very least it should be considered there might be implementation concerns related to outright deleting avatars, as completely ridiculous as that sounds.

I haven't seen the code base for BotB (and I don't really mean to say that it's "bad") - but as somebody who does a lot of work on legacy, data driven systems, it's unusual to completely delete data, even silly things like an avatar. There's a non-zero chance that there is some unexpected reliance on certain data existing in the database.

At the very least, I would expect something like an avatar delete to be non-trivial if it was not designed with that intent in the beginning.

edit: I spell really goodly

Sure, it's a bit out of the spirit of things here to delete the past, but at least with compo entries, you'd have explicitly submitted those in a competition context, even if there are a BUNCH I'd rather just strike from the record -- I was a stupid teenager 12 years ago, lol.
However, a lot of people probably didn't expect avatars to stay saved on the site after being changed. I'm all for being able to hide or remove past ones totally.

there's an option to hide old avatars in the settings