Are Avatars suuported? If they will slow the board down, please do not allow them.

Yes...this software supports Avatars, as the FAQ refers to using them "if your administrator has them pre-defined". There are none pre-defined however.
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Personally I like them, hope they will turn them on...^ . The bandwidth consumed by an avatar is no more then that by all the smilies I have used, etc and not NEARLY as much as ads with motion.

Avatars can be a garish and unsightly nightmare. I for one hope they are NEVER turned on here.

This is another large leisure (cruising) board that uses them and see if you agree with me - they visually overpower every page of every thread:

http://messages.cruisecritic.com/2/O...743085594&p=74


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I have seen it done well...and badly. The boards that allow the users to upload a JPG of any size I agree, look bad. I have also seen boards with 20-30 pre-defined, small avatars...essentially large smilies, and it didnt look bad at all.

As for your example, I didnt fint the avatars unsightly, but I did not like the general forum look or the massive signatures in motion!

I like the idea of avitars. However, they should not be uploaded. Your avitar should be on a 3rd party server somewhere so it does not slow down FT.

So, the most vocal critic ever of the fact that I started the Word Association Thread here introduced it himself on another board??!!??

Ah, and I thought I couldn't have another bite after Easter dinner, but irony is just soooo delicious!

BTW, I am in agreement that I don't want to see avatars on Flyertalk. At least if they do come, then I see an option in my profile to suppress them.

If speed is the concern, that could & probably would be slower...and I doubt Randy wants to rely on a 3rd party to provide any content for his board anyway.

Why does everyone think Avatars are these massive bandwidth hogging entities anyway? It's just a small jpg or bmp. Look around the screen in front of you...FT is already filled with graphics.

I don't think you follow what I ment. You would be responsable for providing a URL to your avitar (link) and the avatar would not be uploaded to FT. This would only degrade the speed of loading the avatar on your computer if the connectin to the URL you provided was slow. Manyy BBS work this way with non uploaded avatars in order to save bandwith and storage space. It also allows for larger file size.

I understand what you are saying, but I am not sure why. If speed is the issue...and thats what I keep hearing the most (other than those "visually artistic" FT'ers), how would this help?

"Joe" uploads an 250k avatar to www.joe.com...which could be hosted on a server in Botswana, Kenya over land lines. When loading the page, in addition to pulling all the many existing images & ads from FT, you also have to pull this one image (size unknown and uncontrollable) from another server of unknown quality. FT would also have no control over the the image itself which could be potentially offensive. How is this better?

Again if speed is the issue, what difference does the hosted location make? If anything it makes it (potentially) much worse. Flyertalk now has multiple servers so avatars are not going to make a speed difference serving the page and the extra bandwidth consumed would be very small.

I also agree that like smilies, you should be able to mute them if desired.

I just think it's sad to see FT purchase a "Lexus quality" forum system, then not use all the bells & whistles it provides. Isnt voting part of this new forum system? Why not use it to find out what people really think...(or is that disabled as well... )

Because the image is not on the FT server so the traffic is not going over the FT server. It is slowing down your connection to the net, not the FT traffic.... If you still don't understand, then you should not be arguing the point.

hehe...Oh, trust me I understand the topic intimately...I just dont understand YOU, as you make no sense.

So...according to your logic:

1. Avatars slow down connections
2. All Avatars should be hosted on third party servers because of this.

-BUT-

3. Every forum page has Avatars.
4. Every FT user would have to load these Avatars anyway.

Your conclusion: Everyones connection to FT will remain peppy because these speed reducing Avatars will be loaded from elsewhere. But since everyone has to load them, everyones connection will be slowed...albeit from somewhere else. Yup...that makes perfect sense.

I suppose you could make the argument that these 3rd party servers could take there own sweet time to load the Avatars, while the rest of the page loads quickly around them, but that could look look worse then the avatars themselves when pages dont load, bad links, etc....and you didnt address the size & content issue. Care to?

Another good reason not to have avatars is that there needs to be no debate on whether they slow down FT or not.

The best way to deal with decisions like these is to forget about speed. Decide if Avatars are desired. If so, then let the techies determine if they would be feasable. This discussion has turned into the one we had a while ago about verifacation systems. People kept arguing it could not be technically done, when it could have been done, instead of discussing if it would improve FT.

I run a few BBS-s and some allow Avatars and some do not. Some allow uploading, some require you host your own avatar.

Now THAT I agree with! This has nothing to do with speed...which is the point I was trying to make all along (and evidently not too well!).

So, as long as we're weighing in on THAT... I would vote no. I think it holds for every forum I've been to for every one that's funny or clever, there are at least five that are just a waste of the screen space and distraction (especially when animated!) or just become tiresome corporate logos that we've seen enough of already.

See DSLReports for a case in point as to how cluttered (IMO) the avatars make their otherwise clean and relatively elegant forum design.