Hey Phil! Can we do this?

[Chris Wolfe]

Is this available to us? And if so, how do I get it to show up in my profile options?

http://members.home.com/chriswellison/tgc/Image2.jpg

[Martyn]

If I can jump in here, yes the option can be enabled in vBulletin for users to upload their own Avatar's. However, it's disabled by default for bandwidth and security reasons. The main one here is bandwidth. Most Avatar's are around 1-2k in size, while I know you could easily compress a 50x50 pixel gif and adjust the colour palette to be web optimised, there may be folks who would upload their favourite 500k bitmap. I dunno what Phil's take on this is, but that's why most boards don't enable the feature - gotta get an answer from phil though.

[Chris Wolfe]

That makes good sense Tril. Maybe it could be done with the stipulation that if your avatar is a bandwidth hog, it would be disabled. Folks could then always ask in the forums for some help in optimizing their avatar for web use. Hmmm, maybe they could do that in the Pixel Pushers forum. Oh, I forgot, we don't have that do we? :D

[Alfred Das]

Chris, tril, on that same grab it says:
"Note: the maximum size of your custom image is 50x50 pixels or 20000 bytes..."
Scratch the 500k bitmap then. Dunno if these are hardcoded limits or not, could be replaced with 75x75 (which we have now) and 5kb or something.

A:

[Alfred Das]

Damn tril, your sig virus is spreading! It has mutated away from italics though.
A:

[Chris Wolfe]

SH*T ! Now I've got it.

[Ridcully]

That's how we use avatars over on the Ninja Micros board. We have them limited to 100x100 and 5k file size and we're keeping the bandwidth under 200MB per day even though we've made 5266 posts in just over a week. :)

It's a great way to use them as you can just change your avatar whenever you feel like and don't have to get someone to load it onto the board.

Regards
Ridcully

[Martyn]

Well if it works for NM, maybe it would for us too. Though with 100 active users, it shouldn't be just down to Phil to police it - yet more work we're throwing his way. If everyone agreed to jump on any criminal found offending and beat them with a large stick, maybe Phil would enable it.

[Chris Wolfe]

Originally posted by tril0Byte
Well if it works for NM, maybe it would for us too. Though with 100 active users, it shouldn't be just down to Phil to police it - yet more work we're throwing his way. If everyone agreed to jump on any criminal found offending and beat them with a large stick, maybe Phil would enable it.

Ooh, yeah. Or one person be Avatar Cop. Beat them with their NightClub. [night-stick + billy-club = NightClub] I nominate siggy. She's here all the time anyway.:D

[phil]

Originally posted by tril0Byte
If I can jump in here, yes the option can be enabled in vBulletin for users to upload their own Avatar's. However, it's disabled by default for bandwidth and security reasons. The main one here is bandwidth. Most Avatar's are around 1-2k in size, while I know you could easily compress a 50x50 pixel gif and adjust the colour palette to be web optimised, there may be folks who would upload their favourite 500k bitmap. I dunno what Phil's take on this is, but that's why most boards don't enable the feature - gotta get an answer from phil though.


I agree tril and that is the no.1 reason that it isn't enabled.

I don't see it as a problem for ppl to send me their avatars....out of all of the pics that have been sent my way (even optimised ones) I have been able to drop their file size even further while keeping the quality...also, 9 times out of ten I am also asked to mod the picture in some way before use. I don't mind doing this and it takes all of 5 minutes.

I have to think of dialup users as well, and even a couple of k saved per avatar dramatically increases the forums speed. The number of hits per day averages 1700 so you can see the saving that can be made.