Like I mentioned in a reply above, I believe the main problem here is not how you choose among the pictures, but to get users to submit any pictures. So in this reply, I propose a scheme to motivate people to submit new action shots we can use.
Some people here occasionally complain that we should make PerlMonks more "modern" and "web 2.0 compatible". They ask for ajax-based voting and chatterbox nodelets and other shiny stuff. Let's pretend we buy into that and introduce avatar images.
This seems "modern", for all the popular forum websites are doing it. For the more conservative monks who won't like it we'll tell we find the idea suitable for a perl programming style as CPAN search already shows the avatar of module owners for each module (never mind that that's just one image per page), and that they can disable it in their settings anyway.
So, monks would be given the ability to upload an avatar image, and this image is shown on the left of each post of that monk. This would work similarly to homenode images, but would be much more prominent, for you'd see a lot of them in long threads. The images would of course be limited to smaller dimensions, say 50 x 60 pixels. (We'll also have to decide whether animated GIFs are accepted.) Obviously displaying the avatars in threads would have to be enabled by default, both for old and new users, to get lots of views.
We would, however, place some disclaimer somewhere in the PerlMonks FAQ that by posting an avatar image, you irrevocably give PerlMonks the right to use that image as a monkpic. We don't even have to hide this in particular, nobody reads instructions anyway.
So then, after, say, two months of putting up with this nonsense, we just swipe the best avatars and install them as monkpics. We then finally disable the avatar feature forever and revert the site to look good.
There are two further ways to enchance this scheme. Firstly, we promise a few XP to the owners of three best images. Not much, just some insignificant reward, like 10 XP for three users each. This is the same ploy as marketing people use when they need free photos of smiling babies for the new bulletin board ads of some product. They hold a "photo contest", give small cash reward to the three parents sending in the best photos; but keep all the hundreds of photos they've received for themselves, for the contestants have signed away all rights to the photos for free when they've sent them in. The second enhancement is to add a default avatar for each user. This is done on many popular websites, so we can claim we're just following the fashion and that it's required to be "web 2.0 compliant". We make the default avatars horrible enough that people want to replace them quickly. If possible, make them varied enough that it's not always obvious which avatars are default and which are user-submitted, thus urging users to replace them even more lest others think they've uploaded that horrible avatar that is in reality a default image randomly supplied by the website.
In reply to Re: May we quest for new (top right) perlmonk images
by ambrus
in thread May we quest for new (top right) perlmonk images
by rgiskard
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