What ejj said. That’s what I want too. I didn’t hit the Like button b/c I don’t want like buttons. Give me what ejj described and I’ll be one happy Liner.
Just out of curiosity, what do people have against likes? I’ve seen two or three people say that since all of this began.
@outer, I’m against anything that slows this thing down. “Like” is just another useless graphic (among many) that has to load that adds zero to the experience. I simply want to read what people have to say. Period. A super-fast-loading text-only interface would be marvelous.
What ejj said. Plus, I appreciated that chat didn’t have a Like button b/c it forced us to craft words of agreement or appreciation. When one reads Grumpy’s heartfelt tribute to this community that the posted yesterday, what I love about chat is reading the responses. How empty that would be to see that replaced with 20 Likes.
Seems like it might be a relatively simple stop-gap, for someone to develop a a service that scrapes the thread lists and threads for the bare-bones information to enable an all text view of the forum.
1 Like
Wow thanks for such an informative post.
I understand where youre coming from, but the “Like” button and other icons are all less than 1kb combined, and its only a one time download. Your browser will cache it and serve that from then on out. Avatars are usually only 3-10kb each, and again, those will be cached after one download.
Its obviously going to be a bit bulkier in terms of data than the barebones, all-text Lines Chat, but once your browser has been caching things after a few minutes of browsing, I wouldnt doubt if the load times are actually as fast, if not faster, than Lines Chat. I wouldnt put any money on it yet, but once we’re done fine tuning things around here, I’m going to do a more rigorous measurement and post some results.
“Like” takes up SPACE. It’s another thing to scroll thru/past over & over & over. Less white space & clutter & bloatware is a good thing. A text-only, no-avatar-clutter option would be outstanding. Thanks. 
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FWIW, and this speaks well to the TP IT team, IMO the chat (and the rest of the stuff under m.touringplans.com) is probably the fastest-loading site I’ve encountered on the internet, maybe even including my own hand-written-for-speed-loading web page. I’m totally serious. The thing even worked super-fast on my old 3G (when it worked) Blackberry before I got the S4. And everything was slow on that Blackberry. Again, FWIW. I guess I got spoiled. 
But really, clutter is just… clutter. Chat was super-clean, info/text-only, and it rocked. I know we won’t ever have that, but a text-only option… or something close to it… would rock too. 
Thanks.
Also, assume an avatar takes up 3k, your low-ball estimate. And there’s a thread with 10 users on it, 30k. Add in the likes & the other stuff, conservatively 35k. That’s the equivalent of 140 250-character messages on chat. Just for 10 pictures. I know, I know, I’m quibbling, but in a long thread… that adds up. Now if you had a thread w/140 posts… that’s 420k,which could have fit 1680 little 250-character messages. There’s no mystery as to why the chat was so fast.