Re: Dingbats in node titles: What's your opinion

[blakem]

Personally, I find them rather distracting, but also agree with Chmrr above. We should discuss why one would want to decorate their posts, then address those wants in a manner that doesn't pollute everyone elses view of the site.

Since I use my own interface to Newest Nodes, I was able to easilly remove the "title droppings" from my view. Quick and kludgy to be sure, but this seemed to work:

# attempt to remove annoying title droppings
$title =~ s/[^ -~]+//g;      # unprintable ascii
$title =~ s/&#?\w{1,8};//g;  # html entities

That said, if people want to track their posts I'd recommend tweaking one of the alternate interfaces, or just grab the XML feeds and build your own. Better yet, dig into the Everything engine and patch it so everyone sees their own posts and followups highlighted.

I've never like the proliferation of:

(myname) Re: (hername) Re: (hisname) Re: whatever" by myname

And the new droppings make it even worse. I would, however, be willing to help code a better solution.

-Blake