Auto skrinking of avatars?

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Some PHP forums automaticly shrink user's avatar no matter what size it is. I think that's a great feature which allows me to use various niffty images as my avatars in forums such as HOTU( http://www.the-underdogs.org/forum/index.php ).

For example:

http://www.samods.com/~lachie/DEANCRY6.gif

[Rhiannon]

So.....what's the issue?

[RST]

This issue is he likes it, thereby implying he would like to see it here (or is it here already?). Personally, I don't think there's any need because no one here has those huge annoying avatars....

[oracle]

Those "huge, annoying avatars" are against the rules anyway

Actually, AFAIK there's been so much complaint about having that not standard in phpBB 2.0.X that it's gonna be added to 2.2

[Neo]

Those "huge, annoying avatars" are against the rules anyway

IMHO I agree with the rules of avatars not bigger than, what was it?, 15 kB.

[TheBigBasicQ]

Ok, autoshrinking may be good but it should shrink in proportion and not make a mess of it while doing so.

[oracle]

On the contrary, it should make a mess of it so the user is forced to obey the rules

And it's 15K Neo

(thx SCM)

[Neo]

And it's 15K Neo

Oops... Corrected it

On the contrary, it should make a mess of it so the user is forced to obey the rules

If you think that... wouldn't it be much better just to make a routine that prints out a random crap picture instead of the avatar? :lol:

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I'm sure this forum could be modifyied on that way so that user can pick if he wants to use an avatar under 80*80 or a bigger one shrinked to size preset by the admin.

[Neo]

I'm sure this forum could be modifyied on that way so that user can pick if he wants to use an avatar under 80*80 or a bigger one shrinked to size preset by the admin.

There are some problems with that. See further points.
1. Big avatars require a lot of space
2. Have you thought about telephone modem (28/56k) users?
3. If the routine that shrank the avatars would be client-sided, there'd be much more code to download and to process, thereby slowing down the page downlad.
4. If the routine that shrank the avatars would be server-sided, the server would have to be a powerful computer to deal with many of that routine calls.