Smilies invading - :-) ;-) :-0 :-(

So guys, some of you have put some more pressure on Asher when I was out, and he did turn smilies "on".
I won't discuss Asher's decision, he's the boss!
BUT
please use them carefully, and when needed only.
Some threads are looking now like teenager's forum talking basketball or Nintendo (nothing against that, just another place to be).

I don't want OPF to be boring, and I agree (and appreciate) that some time we may unstress with some jokes, fun, and humoristic comments but, even as photographers, we still can use words to tell our moods and feelings, humor (humour) spirit and lot more... this is so much richer!
Hopefully OPF members are sharing a lot and don't use SMS awfull spelling, then why use these shortcuts?

It would be preferable, if a poster wants to show his mood beyond wording, to use just the following:

;-)
:-0
:-(
etc...

Nicolas,

I took the liberty of editing you last sentence. Is this your meaning or did I get it wrong?

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Nicolas,

I took the liberty of editing you last sentence. Is this your meaning or did I get it wrong?

Asher

Click to expand...

Asher
you read my brain, and write it so much better!

Thanks Nicolas for presenting the design point of view.

I have a philosophical point of view. Our photography, itself is a serious committement of time, effort, talent and expense. We want to really be having an attitide respecting that when we actually deal with our photography.

I'm all for fun, yet there's a place for it. In any case, we don't want the smilies to be a rash spreading all over the forum. (We've had enough of that to last a lifetime!)

The photography parts, are seriously for photography, and that is where the fun comes from, not from smurfettes and the like.

Layback here. Photography there.

Asher

When I was a teenager, smilies weren't around.....

Ayway, I suspect it will all self regulate. afaik, you can only add four images to a post, if its the fancy moving ones, then a pm would do it, or prevent the inclusion of gifs, if possible. I personally agree with Nicolas, but only when its plain text, not html. Maybe a colour scheme could be decided on, like red 'cos we broke some rules, green referring to some other post, whatever , white when you want to be 'up close and personal' ;-)

Talking about 'when I was a teenager' .. that's going off topic

Best wishes,

Ray

Ray West said:

When I was a teenager, smilies weren't around.....
Ray

Click to expand...

Me neither, we had badges (these round stupid metal things, printed, to clip on our vests)
LOL at large

Ray,

I've been thinking of preparing a color scheme too. Will get it to Nicolas!

Asher

Ray, I vote for plain text, too, and as little technicolor as possible in the fonts.

Notwithstanding that I'm a great facilitator of smilies in another area of my life.

In Germany, just after the war, we were so poor, we didn't even have smiles.

I hate emoticons but can understand why most people like them. Occasionally I use them myself because any humans have lost the ability to decypher sentences. Gosh, would Shakespeare had got those inane graphical representations of fundamental emotions ...

:-?

Is this forum a sort of experiment in 'mind control'. I will play by these rules, I will be assimilated into the greyness of the opf? I have enough problems driving around, trying to remember if its a 40 or 50mph speed limit, and so on, without being told how to behave when I come in here.

So, there's a choice to be made. Either I leave, or opf gets to lighten up a bit. It will lighten up, in time, I suspect. At the moment, there is too much interference for my liking, makes me wonder why the word 'open' is in the title.

Best wishes,

Ray

Maybe we're all just feeling our way along?

It all feels so new and fluid to me. Very open to change, to fit the needs of those taking part in the conversations.

I'm not yet thinking of OPF as the Borg.

Hi Mary,

You're right, but I've been here longer than you - nahdenahnah.... Its maybe like a snowball rolling down the hill. some folk pusshing one side, others the other side, hopefully keeping it on course, without running into a ditch on either side. Anyway, you earned your instant respect by publishing the first pet cat picture here, afaik. My approach is more subtle - like in a 'demolition derby' ;-)

Best wishes,

Ray

Be careful, I'm about to fall in love with you.

Ray West said:

[...] being told how to behave when I come in here.

Click to expand...

Any place on earth where you are not coerced to play by the rules?

BTW, don't get my last post wrong, I am not against switching the automatically-convert-punctuation-mark-combos feature on. I merely found it necessary to say what I think of them.

But I thought we were trying to form the rules. And why do we need rules for this? May as well say we must use properly structured sentances, correct spelling, punctuation, etc. smilies can add an extra dimension to meaning for some folk and so on and so forth, it will level itself out.

Dierk, Nicolas, have a look at my snaps in the google earth thread, please, guess where they are, then I can put Mary out of her misery.... there's good chaps, toodle pip,

Ray

It would be nice if people tried to use proper grammar, even some thought and structure - makes reading much easier. All those grammar rules (and others) are there for a reason: readability. They should make it as easy as possible for the reader, not the writer. Unfortunately German politicians and some linguists forgot this when coming up with new spelling rules a few years back.

I am also dismayed by the wrong perception many readers have, thinking that what I've written above means that whenever they have trouble understanding a text it's the writer's fault. Au contraire, readers will have to read attentively since - in a a text from an attentive writer - graphical representations of what some seem to think are emotions are not needed, the text itslef contains everything to understand it.

In another thread Asher wrote of the 'professional touch' this forum shall reflect in its UI, which I find a very good idea. Little yellow jumping balls, perhaps vomiting, are surely anything but professional. I wonder why these are called for, it's not as if ASCII forbids emoticons ... hey, wait, they were really developed under ASCII (BTW, before computers, they have come up with typewriters), so it should be possible to use them in this forum regardless pf any vBulletin setting.

My 1/8th of a smiley

To me, the lack of smileys in an

1. active
2. young
3. online

community is a fairly unneeded limitation.

One of the biggest problems any newly created group has to be permanently solving at such early stages of its existence is a problem of misunderstanding. Especially a widely international community such as this. And even more, a community mostly consisting of highly talented artists, who, by nature of things, are also rather easily offendable people. For many of us English is not our native language (e.g. for me it's third), and as such it's rather easy for any of us to make a comment that would be misinterpreted by a person with different cultural background and language skills.

Various smiles, being graphical and pretty much universal, do not need to be translated and essentially play the role of the facial expressions, thus allowing the reader to hear the intonation.
Of course, you can put a helluva lot more time in every post and eventually find the way to express yourself with the clarity of some prominent Cambridge scholar, but... it's an online forum, not many people have that much time to spend on a single post, especially if it's a simple response.

I'm not saying we must use the emoticons all the time. But having grown up in a (not existing anymore) country where pretty much everything was verboten, I grew a very sensitive skin to any sort of artificial limitations. I hate them with a passion, to put it mildly. As Ray West mentioned, such limitations do not rhyme well with the openness declared in the forums title.

It seems that we don't have many teenagers here, so I really don't think we'll ever have a case of smiley abuse. And even if it becomes an issue, let me tell you: communities can be self-regulating just fine. But to become self-regulating it should be free, open in the first place.

Smileys are the integral part of the online lingo. Let them be.

PS
I intentionally did not use any emoticons here.
Now, how can you tell when I'm half joking and when I'm dead serious?

Off Putting

I'm still in my first couple days here. What I can offer is a fairly fresh impression.

To be honest, I experience this thread as being a bit ominous.

How much energy do you as members want to devote to shaping other members' modes of expression?



Suzanne

Nikolai Sklobovsky said:

Various smiles, being graphical and pretty much universal, do not need to be translated and essentially play the role of the facial expressions, thus allowing the reader to hear the intonation.

It seems that we don't have many teenagers here, so I really don't think we'll ever have a case of smiley abuse.

Click to expand...

I agree with both these points.

Another point is that the latest trend for SMG shorthand bears no relation to the use of smilies in many cases. As an adult myself (rather than teenager), I use language just as I was taught at school. As correctly as I remember. But I do love smilie icons to relate the intonation of my mood. When typing we cannot hear the tone of voice as we would in conversation, so we are missing the clues which we would normally gather to pick up the message correctly. Very often misinterpretation happens because of these missing clues in the voice.

I like them. )

Personally, I type smiles when I smile. It is spontaneous and natural just like when talking in person. I do not pause and say "I just smiled" because it is unneeded. The use of emoticons is truthfully an expansion of language and brings in a visual element to the written word.

I am fine with just plain text emoticons and have little need for fancy graphical ones.

As to the rules of grammar, they are about the absolutely worst possible way to learn written communication. Just reading a few hundred well written novels will teach you more about how to write than decades of studying grammar. This is not to say the rules of grammar and the structure of a language has no value as that structure is helpful in learning a new language through the mapping of like and un-alike structures. But the rules of grammar are next to worthless in learning to communicate fluently with the written word.


enjoy,

Sean

Here's how it is.

Simple smilies are fine here. We have already agreed. This is the more relaxed part of the forum.

To give a better over view, let me orientate everyone to our design philosophy.

We enter here and find, 3 rooms for lighter discussion: first introduction, next casual and humor, next a little more formal. This is akin to an entrance hall, den and garden with friends and families and then, this particular room for a customer service, lost and found.

At the far end of the building, protected by a warning sign is the area for adults only and those who can stomach hot debates on contentious issues. People, who might find this too confrontational, should not enter, to protect themselves. For sure, some subjects and some pictures might be offensive to some religious persuasions, liberals or traditionalists.

In the center, all the rooms are for professional photography: places for exploring, questioning and sharing the how, what and why and joy of serious photography.

O.K., that then is the structure of OPF.

For criticism of the decisions of OPF monitors, please PM one of the OPF administrators. We want to be responsive. However, we don't want to divert energy from photography discussion.

This forum is free, open to anyone to join who has a serious interest in photography and professional posts are not removed. However, we cannot discuss design issues to the detriment of the balance of the forum.

We ask for understanding and self-discipline. Any idea you submit by PM will be addressed promptly.

Sean DeMerchant said:

This is not to say the rules of grammar and the structure of a language has no value ...
Sean

Click to expand...

have no value

It is not my habit to correct grammer but I couldn't resist.


- DL

Why did I refrain from putting in my point about 'nobody's gonna spank you for making mistakes', yesterday?

Don Lashier said:

It is not my habit to correct grammer but I couldn't resist.

- DL

Click to expand...

I thought it was spelled 'grammar'?

Correct term: Kelsey.

As nearly always, lately, I had to Google for it--
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001288/

X marks the spot.

Just call me Niles.

Don Lashier said:

have no value

It is not my habit to correct grammar but I couldn't resist.

Click to expand...

It depends upon whether one is refering the singular referential developed by the and, or plurality of items brought together by the and. Has is the appropriate term for the singular entity, the rules of grammar and the structure of a language. Hence blindly going with what an english* professor would fail to convey that I was refering to it as a singular entity. This is the same as saying roll of film is singular even though it is a spindle, a case, and some film wound into it.

enjoy,

Sean


*english with a lowercase 'e' is the correct spelling for the language spoken in North America. With a capitol 'e' it becomes a proper noun and becomes the language of England and not that of Australia, North America, and etcetera. What is widely called American English (more properly US English) is part of english. But, english as a language encompassing the many is not a proper noun any more than feline is a proper noun.

Hi Sean!

I am so tickled to get to participate in all these conversations with articulate artists.

A native speaker of english (sic), who grew up in a home where standard English was spoken, I tend to just fly by the seat of my pants.

And in the construction under discussion my gut feeling is "rules have." A little differently worded, with "structure" as the subject of the clause my magic sixth sense would have told me "structure has."

But I enjoyed considering your cogent and closely reasoned analysis.

I'm really enjoying seeing the various takes on this here. Could we start a new thread, since this is fairly well OT to the subject (title) of this thread, now?

@Sean:
And maybe move it to the Layback Cafe?
Or to Provocative Thoughts and Images--discussing people's language usage can be pretty provocative sometimes. Although, so far, not here.
I'd just like to continue the discussion in a forum more designed for stuff OT to photography, and with a relevant title. That is, if you have enough interest to discuss grammar and philosophy of communication with me some more.