Animated Avatars

Wahesh

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As far as I'm aware, Animated GIFs are not available on this website as an Avatar. Obviously, we don't want pages taking AGES to load (I agree), so, why not have a limit on Avatar sizes, something like 100kb (or along those lines)?

We're in Australia, a country leading the way with Broadband technology. Everyone has fast internet now and downloading web pages takes seconds. Most people have very fast internet with what... 500 gig of data to use per month, and they don't get anywhere near that limit. Why not make this simple change to reflect that?

Also, I find it bizarre that there is a limit on size of the Avatar AND a restriction on having animated GIFs as avatars because they make the page loading time too long - it makes the size restriction redundant. Let us use animated GIFS (that actually animate in our posts) and simply have a size restriction of 100kb, and NOT have a format restriction.
 

Wahesh

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Australia has fast internet? Lolwut.
I do... and the NBN hasn't even kicked in yet.

Let's not digress from the main point of this topic.
 

Mr Invisible

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Definitely one for @Nash to answer.

Part of the reason for moving to Xenforo was getting away from the cumbersome and clunky operation of VBulletin. Allowing animated avatars may not seem like a big issue at first, but if you are talking 100kb per animated avatar, and there are 10 per page, that's 1MB being served up, and that's only a single user. Now add in 20 users viewing that thread and you have 20MB being served up at that time *all approximations*. Now consider that over the entire forum with say 100+ users online, all viewing different pages.

By using that example it wouldn't take long to choke up not only the database, but the speed of the forum.

There are very few (large) forums out there that allow animated avatars, for that reason alone. Interested to know of some that do actually. Many are even more restrictive (take Whirlpool for example), one of Australias largest forums on custom written software, which has no avatars, signatures, or images allowed to display in threads, it's text only.

Animated gifs are a gigantic pain in the arse because they lack proper compression, and often cause memory leaks in browsers because of how they display/cache.
 

Wahesh

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Ok thank you Mr I but you digressed from my original point. The point I was stating is that the FORMAT should not be an issue. The size is. From what I recall, the kennel allows 40kb avatars... why not allow within that 40kb limit animated GIF formats? It will not slow the download time of pages. It simply allows users a different format to use. If they're allowed to use JPG, BMP, PNG, then they should be allowed to use animated GIFS as well provided they are within that limit.

Not allowing animated GIFs simply because they animate makes the 40kb limit redundant.
 

Ecca

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Australia has fast internet? Lolwut.
I have fast internet 100mbps / second unlimited downloads, I can download porn so fast, it finishes before I do
 

N4TE

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I reckon animated avatars would be a bit annoying..
 

Wahesh

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If there is a size limit on them, they would be contained.

Also Mr I, I myself once ran a forum about 10 years ago. It didn't last much longer than a year, however animated avatars were allowed and weren't a problem - I had encouraged most of my users to have one too. They did and it added life to the forum. I think having it on here couldn't hurt - at least for a trial of say 48 hours?
 
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Mr Invisible

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Personally (and this is opinion) I find them incredibly annoying on forums.

@Nash ... thoughts on this one?
 
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