Re, animated and large avatars and signatures - I agree with Gabe that they are distracting - note I limited my example (
http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=419 ) to ten cycles.
Also, for people who are connecting via dial-up or other limited bandwidth connections, downloading large files of this type seems to be a poor use of what bandwidth they do have.
Having said that, I also think it is a shame not to have a place in the general forum for such thing, since Alice can do them as well or better than almost any of the free option out there, and certainly do them with much less effort. People with low bandwidth connections (or no intrest,
this
is out of the main educational thrust of the Alice project) could avoid that section unless they had time for long or even, in some cases very long, downloads. If this is to hard in the existing forum format, how about a separate site?
What I'm thinking of is a "General Animation Gallery" where things made using Alice but converted to non-Alice formats could be posted and maybe even displayed. Which cases to display is TBD, but I personally would like to see animated GIF's displayed up to several hundred K. I imagine the "Building Virtual Worlds" web page designers could probably provide some guidelines. In addition to what they support, I would like to see the .avi format supported since that's what the recommended screen capture tool (BSR) uses and so far I've had good luck with it - Flash would also be useful.
While I'm making suggestions, how about a specific "Tutorials" section. Gabe has done a nice job in rearranging some things already
- but there still is a lot of good information in the Forum that can be a bit difficult to find - even if you can get through the "are you a human" test of the search engine. (
I fail often enough that I'm beginning to wonder.
) I know I'd contribute some things and imagine several others would also.