Community Relations Archive

This is pretty trivial, but I'd like to make a couple of suggestions for how profile icons are handled.

ICON FOLDERS

Shouldn't profession icons get their own folder under the Icons tab in a user's Profile page?

Currently every profession icon is duplicated in the CommunityVeteran folder(called "Special"), the CommunityLeader folder (called "Community Leader"), and the Community Elder folder (also called "Special"). This creates a lot of unnecessary clutter in these specialty folders, and undermines somewhat the value of having achieved Veteran, Leader, or Elder status.

Why not create a Professions folder (which I hope could be called "Professions"), put all profession icons (and related icons, such as Test Center) into this folder, and mark this folder as available to all forum members without regard to post count or length of time since forum signup?

If you do this, you might also want to revise the folder structure somewhat to correspond to the new forum rank system. That way it would be easy to key the permissions of folders to the user's forum rank, so that as soon as a new forum rank is achieved, the appropriate icon folder becomes available.

ICON ALT TAGS

I've noticed that the profile icons as displayed on an actual message don't have anything in their ALT tags -- there's no floating text box that pops up when you hover the mouse cursor over a profile icon. It would be nice if the ALT tag information could be filled in for these icons for a couple of reasons.

First, it's not always clear (especially with the profession icons) what an icon stands for. If I could see the name of the icon when I hover the mouse cursor over the icon, that would help me understand what the person who left the message is interested in.

Second, ALT tags arean important accessibility featurefor vision-impaired users.

Thanks for considering these suggestions!

--Flatfingers

Message Edited by Nimhnoid on 01-31-2005 10:13 AM

Flatfingers,

Great suggestions. I particularly agree with you on the folders for the icons. I think that as some of the new ones were added the folders didn't really make sense, although they did at one point. For example, Community Leader used to just have the light sabre icons.

Nimhnoid,

This thread should answer your question about the new icon. As you will read, you qualify for it, but there is a problem with it not being retroactive. However, when you hit the next forum rank you will get this one and one more. Good luck.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=communityrelations&message.id=297#M297