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[termitehead]

Not only are they annoying but some of the forum members have avatar images that approach 1MB in size - a little crazy.  I know some forums ban animated avatars so it's not unheard of.

[3]

If you're worried about page loading times/bandwidth, why not just hide avatars in general? (Profile -> Modify Profile -> Look and Layout -> Don't display users' avatars)

[Morrigi]

But banning stuff is fun... BANBANBANBANBANBANBAN!!!!11111

[Capntastic]

Yeah, a lot of users have giant avatars that are shrunk down to like 40x80 pixels, but they still need to load like a megabyte.  I'm more concerned about horribly compressed images that are still a huge load time, rather than animated ones that are actually worth the bandwidth.   But it's hard to enforce style.

[Morrigi]

I'm on a horrible internet connection in Mexico at the moment, and I haven't had any issues with avatars.

[Untelligent]

If an individual avatar really bothers you, you can adblock it:

-download the firefox addon AdBlock if you don't have it already
-Right-click the offending animation
-Click "Adblock Image"
-Select the most specific option (the one on top that ends in a .gif or similar extension)

This way you can prevent the worst offenders from loading while the harmless animations that consist of 2-4 frames don't get punished.

[zwei]

While animations can be good, i have noticed the "1000x600", 1mb images used as avatars and it is not really great. not only does it pointlessly waste bw, it also has to stay in memory and having page weight 5 extra megs certainly affects perfomance of browser.

Also, browser nearest-pixel downscaling makes them look pretty bad usually.

---

As for ugliness and clutter, I thank to god that this forum does not allow image sigs.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It does, it just limits them. If you don't see an image in my sig, it's because you've turned them off.

If we had more admins here, we could have moderation of avatars, dealing with worst offenders on a case-by-case basis.

[Capntastic]

Yeah, just in general as well, the forums have really grown in this last year especially.

[Muz]

But then my avatar would be boring. Anyway, if there's a 1000x600 image, I think it just loads the smaller, highly aliased, compressed version, not the whole 1000x600 image.

[Sean Mirrsen]

No, it loads the whole image, just displays it compressed. It's the same resizing mechanism that makes these


 look the way they do.

[Silverionmox]

If an individual avatar really bothers you, you can adblock it:

-download the firefox addon AdBlock if you don't have it already
-Right-click the offending animation
-Click "Adblock Image"
-Select the most specific option (the one on top that ends in a .gif or similar extension)

This way you can prevent the worst offenders from loading while the harmless animations that consist of 2-4 frames don't get punished.

Opera has that standard. I only needed to block just one specific animated avatar here, though not for bandwith reasons.

[Funk]

but good animated avata ae fun to see

[TatersAndTots]

Good points everyone. I personally love my animated avatar and don't wanna see them leave. So, how can I manually make a smaller version of this image? I have no clue how big it is, but having a separate tiny-sized image would be the best of both worlds. I get my gif, and i don't lag the forums as much.

[Rex_Nex]

If this forum is anything like my VBulliten forum, then any of the admins could simply add a max byte limit for avatars. I think 100-300 KB would be good for a forum like this.

As for TaterandTots, download GIMP. It has a easy resize tool I'm fairly certain works with GIF images nicely. Cant be exactly sure the quality will be just as good as it is now, but it will be pretty good.