Minecraft Forums

No, I'm not talking about mine. I won't put what I don't want people to see.

What I'm talking about here is that massive block of text next to many posts with all the crap I don't care about. When my computer sends, "Hwy, tell me what this thread says," I want it to NOT get the autobiography of every poster involved. Ideally, I'd like to be able to turn off various bits of personal information separately because avatars tend to give a 'face' to many forum-goers and I might not want to disable signatures, but if not, batch it all together. This is your chance to tell me all about yourself and, frankly, I don't care.

• I don't see why the site is telling me anybody's join-date in the first place.
• There's no reason to see your PSN/XBox/PC ID in every post.
• The list of titles you came up with for various post-counts may be mildly amusing, but I'm going to ignore it at least 95% of the time.
• Post-count is a joke, because children with tons of free time tend to have a high count from posting everywhere, and people who only comment when it matters won't have the 'clout' that one would expect.
• Signatures are occasionally-cute, rarely-useful clutter.
• Your currently-accrued 'karma' doesn't mean you're right or wrong about any given topic.

So, in short, you're wasting your bandwidth. You're sending me a pile of crap that I've not requested to see, am going to ignore, and would rather not have clutter my screen. Further, this information being needlessly passed to somebody who doesn't want to see it only slows the performance of the site. If I'm that interested in 'stalking' a member, I can look at their profile. If they want me to see those things, they can put them there - and I'll see those things if I care enough to look into the person instead of just having a conversation.

Note that I don't say you need to remove this information, nor that others would want to disable it. I'm only pointing out that if you allow it to be disabled, you increase performance at no loss to those who wish to disable all these frivolous bits of displayed information. Consider that a 'lite' version of your forum, with less information sent at each request, is a gift both to yourselves and to those who just want a forum.

This concept carries over to the discussion elsewhere on themes, and can be taken a step further to consider a setup where posted images must be clicked to be loaded. I believe most (if not all) of this is done on a site known as Warseer - though I've not frequented said site for some time due to flagging interest in their primary content.

Assuming the site has significant traffic, sees users with varying Internet performance, and/or wants to simply offer a 'perk' which only benefits them by reducing computing done upon each request, those kilobytes are both precious and 'free' good-will.

And, honestly, your response to this thread may have been less data than the personal info I just got along with it. Think of all the one-liner posts you've seen and consider that, if 1/2 of the people using the forum turned off personal info, you could cut data routed by roughly 1/4 per such post. Essentially you decreased bandwidth usage for a lot of stuff as though you cut out a quarter of the views.

Even just roughing some numbers, if this option were to result in a 1/4 reduction in information sent and 1/5 of people would turn off personal information, we're talking about removing 5% of the site's bandwidth usage for what would only be considered an improvement.