We've temporarily disabled the display of player icons and other player-specified images (such as img tags in player profiles or waiting room notes). We'll bring the feature back in a few months, but in a different form.
We're doing this because both player icons and the img tag used images hosted on other sites, where the player specified the URL of the image, and we just repeated that URL on our pages largely without examining it. This means that our pages referred to resources (images) on other sites that we at Pocket-Monkey don't know anything about. Which was mostly fine back in the day.
But things have changed a lot in the last five years or so, and it's no longer appropriate for us to let people embed images on our pages that come from sites we don't know. Separately, player icons have been a bit of a pain because people didn't stick to the size restrictions and we didn't enforce them. Also, a huge number of the player icon URLs people list are either malformed or point to images that don't exist (anymore). (I recently checked the player icons for all players online at a given time; more than half were invalid or missing.)
Why isn't it appropriate for us to allow images from other sites anymore? Well, it's because the web is both less safe than it used to be, and more safe than it used to be. :-) Less safe because there really is a lot of malicious content out there -- phishing, malware, etc. More safe because web browsers do more than ever before to help protect us from that content, warning us before we visit sites that are known to host or suspected of hosting such things. (More about that in this other thread.) A while back we had a player icon that was causing that warning page to show up when browsing Pocket-Monkey (the player icon itself was not malicious content -- I checked -- but the site it was coming from also, separately, hosted malicious content and so had been flagged). Just recently a couple of players have said they've started getting security warnings periodically when trying to go to the Active Players list -- which probably means it's happened again.
So we're disabling the feature for now, and in a few months (after the big DHTML games update I've been promising forever) we'll replace it with a similar feature, but one that doesn't just allow random links to sites we don't know about, does enforce size restrictions, and will make it impossible to have a "malformed" player icon. (I'm tempted to use gravatar.com or similar, but haven't made any decisions yet.)
Of course! In a few months when we offer the replacement feature, everyone will be welcome to use player icons again. But it will be some months before we get the updated feature in place.
-- T.J. :-)
Re: We've disabled player icons and other player images
Well, I must say, that is probably a smart move on your part, but will miss seeing some of the icons the players use...but I do totally understand it~!!!!! Keep up the good work T.J., your site is one of the best
Re: We've disabled player icons and other player images
Actually, I need to amend that a bit. In tourney backgammon matches it's down at the bottom, as a little sliver, if you visit a match where it's not your move but if it is your move then I can concur that it's disappeared. ;-)
Re: We've disabled player icons and other player images
There is no resign button at the radar salvo games. Check it out. I know it was placed down in other games but it was deleted from radar salvo games I don't see it.
Re: We've disabled player icons and other player images
Oops, thanks for pointing that out. I wonder what's gone wrong there. I've flagged this up for people over in this thread in the "Games: Miscellaneous" section.
I'll have a look, but it'll be a few days before I can get to it (pounded by my Real Job). -- T.J. Crowder First Primate Pocket-Monkey.com
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