Avatars

[Amika]

Do avatars have to be a certain size? What happens if the picture yuo want is bigger than 100X100 pixels?

[Nostradamus]

The limits are 100 pixels horizontal, 150 vertical, and max 10 kb size.

[Amika]

OK, thanks.

[Nostradamus]

Good choice! That movie kicks ass.

[Nostradamus]

I don't suppose there's any chance of getting that 10 kilobyte limit increased a little? I found a cute animated avatar which fits within the pixel limits but exceeds the maximum file size by about 25 KB.

[Sascha]

No, sorry. Remember, this avatar has to be loaded everytime someone accesses a forum page and it often appears multiple times on a page. So the browsers have to handle and display multiple instances of those graphics and that costs CPU and RAM ressources, especially with animated graphics. For most users, this isn't a problem nowadays, but there are still users with old PCs out there.

And I must admit, I'm not such a big fan of animated avatars - especially if they are complex animations with many images. If you look at some other fanboards (mostly for teenage tv shows): everything moves and blinks, sometimes even in their signatures, it's terribly annoying.

Additionally -- there is actually a way to get around our avatar limits ("remote avatars") --- but if we discover it's getting misused, we're going to disable it.