Hi, On Sat March 7 2009 11:20:00 [email protected] wrote: > Hi, > > On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 12:52:04PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote: > > I do know that Olaf likes to use them, but what about making these > > texts more formally appealing and remove all (or most of) the smileys? > > I can only repeat my petition to disable this idiotic image replacement > -- it indeed makes the smileys look silly. > > However, I object to removing the smileys. I put them in for a reason: > liking them has nothing to do with it. > > These pages are for the potential students to read. Many of them are new > to free software development, and most of them are rather awed by it. An > overly formal text would only make it worse. Our requirements for the > application are probably intimidating enough without it -- we should do > everything possible to counteract that! > > I believe the friendly smileys to have an important psychological > effect: they have the express purpose of making the text less formal and > thus intimidating.
As a former GSoCer I can confirm it. More than that: it's important for people who are new to your community, but not just to free software. As we discovered with Sergey at the meeting: every organization has its own outstanding characteristics, so people always think: who are that guys doing Hurd? And smileys are really friendly (except those ugly gifs). -- Best regards, Evgeniy. Key Fingerprint: F316B5A1F6D2054FCD18B74A95400ABB1FE567A3
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
