Registered earlier (thanks to both Adam and Amazingu for filling me in on what I needed to know), but didn't get around to accessing it until now. Searching for an avatar, you see. Then editing, scaling, carefully recoloring (which was tricky for someone using MS Paint instead of Photoshop or something that doesn't, well, suck)...then I get inside and find I don't actually have to use one.

...

That strange noise you heard around 8:30 EST was probably me. Well I spent a good hour on it all told, and in the short term at least I'm damn well going to USE it. Harumph.

Anyway. Here now and reporting for duty, so to speak. Should probably get around to learning HTML finally. It's a strange new world, to be sure.

Oh, and P.S. - expect to not ever see smilies in my posts. Hate 'em to bits. Sorry.

Yeah, it'll feel a little different seeing avatars for people here at first.... 

but of course it's nice that the option is there to disable the viewing, which I promptly applied to the "Signature" option since those are such a huge waste, IMO.

It's nice that most people are at least signing up and making the switch though, yay.

Sigs are limited to three lines, so I really don't think they are such an obstruction.  To each his own though

Yeah, it's nice to have the choice though - I'd be with Carl on the sigs thing, although I have no issue with avatars as they don't break up the text.

I'm with Carl on the sigs thing as well. I won't consider activating it unless it gets its own area far away from the actual message area.

Btw. besides lack of threading there are a couple other things which could be tweaked:
*More and more posts are popping up with a "Last edited by" line appended which is getting annoying to me. Couldn't its date just be moved into the header instead where the original post date is to begin with?
*I'm surprised to say that I like the compact "Topic review" layout (while posting a reply) better than the standard post layout. Most obvious the former seems to lack the spacious footer gap the latter has in every single post (Firefox here).