Hi @shadowbot, while trying to create something that could work for this I thought a problem could be there is some hesitation for people adding something to their posts that feels like an advertisement, and for good reason since people reading the post are put off by this. So I have an idea for it that may encourage it to be used more often and prevent it from looking like an ad, but the idea requires something more added on the website for custom images.
You guys know the forum signatures people make for various kinds of video games or groups that have the person's tag and some stats to brag about? The idea is the shadowbot website could have an image generated for each shadowcaster that displays their profile statistics so that people can use it similar to the forum signature style people seem to like using, and in this way it would be more of a personal thing from perspective of the reader.
Here is my example:
This looks nothing like an ad, right? :D
The hardest part will be having stats that can only be viewed as positive bragging rights. I thought about contribution:reward ratio but then anyone in red on that would probably not want to use it, basically any of the stats shown need to be good or sound cool in some way for it to have the largest impact. There is also some room for improving what can be done for getting new people to join from having seen it, but I am thinking a soft touch would shield from negativity :)
Anyway, I don't think this really follows contest rules since it isn't something to copy/paste anywhere unless people want to tell the world about me (lol), but I figure this is the best way for me to help by always giving more ideas. So I hope this helps in some way ^_^
Love the idea, believe you are implying we host a "dynamic" image that generates a real stats and looks basically how your "entry" looks. Very neat concept, we will add this to our drawing board and see how it could potentially be included. We agree, we are not requiring anyone to ever use a signature, we just have gotten a huge amount of feedback from people asking for a banner to help promote ShadowBot so we figured we would give people one if they want to use it!
yea, I think some dynamic image created based on stats is possible and might have a big impact, but it could be a challenge to make. The testing I did yesterday implies having the signature updated retroactively onto older posts to ensure the latest version is the only one that ever shows may not be possible, because steemit will be hosting the image once it is used in any post even if added to the post as a link to an external host, which I found surprising.
This has some negative implications for my idea such as using the same image url each time resulting in the original image each time regardless of any update (similar to steemit having an image cache that you can't remove), so each new version of the image would need a new url (maybe with date attached), and the person using it may need to grab the new version every so often, but the good news is steemit hosting the image after it is used means the risk of high server load is reduced, and the older images and their links can also be deleted after some expiration without affecting the posts they were used in. You can see the testing of steemit image hosting [here]
Actually, steemit becoming the host for any image link is kinda cool, but also makes this more complicated than I originally thought it would be.
also, the aspect ratio could make a difference:
vs.
vs.
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well, in comment section it doesn't I guess, lol
I would have to agree 100% anything that looks like a add is going to be perceived as negative.