Forum avatars and their size

[watsug]

Hi all!

I find it much easier to recognize people when they have an avatar connected to their forum name. This was especially important when I first joined, as you see hundreds of posters and you try to understand who is who, and what they say across threads. So the people with avatars were much more recognisable, like Kunda1 interdimensional head or Zolkos purple assembly.

Still many (or most) don't have profile avatars, why is that? Instead there's hoards of blue questionmarks. Could we have a push to get more people to set up avatars?

I wasn't better myself until today, but setting up an avatar turned out to be a hurdle. The file size limit is 6KB! I had problem even producing a png with that small file size! I ended up having to use an online image shrinker to make it work.

The image limit is 90x90 px and 6KB. Is this really necessary? Could this be increased to make it easier for people to upload an avatar? (even the default avatar is 96x96 px)

Sites like Github create custom avatars for all new users. Could something like this be used?

Thanks for reading, please give your thoughts.

[chrisb]

I don't think avatars should be bigger. If people have to show something, they do so in the Showcase subforum. I prefer to invest my time in helping other people with their FreeCAD issues and in delivering contents, not gimmicks.

[watsug]

[/quote]

I don't think avatars should be bigger. If people have to show something, they do so in the Showcase subforum.

I don't suggest making the displayed avatars size bigger, just increase the filesize limit.

According to this thread; https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=1351975 its done in
ACP --> Avatar settings --> Maximum avatar file size:

The user still has to scale the image down to 90x90px. I tried scaling a jpg down in paint and the file size was above 6KB. The same in MacOS preview. I don't think more than scaling down to 90px should be asked from the user. A reasonable size could maybe be 32 or 64KB?

I prefer to invest my time in helping other people with their FreeCAD issues and in delivering contents, not gimmicks.

A reasonable stance. Though I think avatars serve a higher usability function than being a gimmick.