I don't know if anyone has already suggested this (searching came up blank). but I was wondering if you have thought about personal member icons with links to IRC, instant messaging, Email, etc, underneath their posts. You could make it voluntary like the signature info, so a member could decide to 1 or 2 or all icons or nothing. Alot of people nowadays have a secondary account they use solely on the net, so spamming wouldn't be so much of an issue, lol! I really think it would bring the aD community closer together.
I can't explain it any better, so here's a link to a forum where I've seen it done.
What ur talking about are avatars... if im not horribly mistaken, its been brought up a bunch of times. I think the final decision was to not do that because of something related to strain on servers and just overal performance issues ;-)
No not avatars, i believe he is talking about putting links along the bottom of each post with PM, Email, User Profile, MSN, IRC, etc as forms of contacting a member. I would have no problem with this and would supply and email address, but only if it was a secure method of sending an email via a system rather than actually giving out my address. That way i chose what to reply to without worrying about my address (not that it matters with the amount of junk i get).
I've avoided adding a possibility to contact users directly via ICQ, email, etc as I consider that the private message functionality we provide is good enough for those purposes (ok, for heavy users folders and contact lists would be nice, but at least the latter one is going to be added soon..) and if the users wish to extend their communications to outside our site's scope, they can always swap ICQ numbers or email addresses via PM.
The only diff between sending an email via our system and sending a PM via our system is that with PMs, the messages are stored on our servers and you need to read/reply to them on our site.
Profiles are one thing that we have planned to add to forums at some stage.
I'll tell you what I think would be usefull, would be a little icon next to your username with the flag of your country,the reason i'm saying this is because last night I was reading the Dvd player threads with people asking where to get cheap players and I nearly replyed to several when it became obvious these guys are in the States and myself being in the Uk my info would be useless.
It would also be interesting to see just how large a global comunity Afterdawn is, as was said above it could be made so it could be turn on or off by the user.
