Aww, best show ever! if you mean The Last Airbender (not the movie)
It reminds me of Leo Gorcey, from the Dead End Kids.
Except in color.
And the cheekbones are suspect.
Out of curiosity, I tried uploading a fully transparent blank png file as my avatar. I wanted to see if it would display nothing other than whatever background color each user’s theme was set for. No luck. It instead displayed as a grey and white checkerboard. I would have shared a link to the image for you if my test was successful, and then you could have deprived everyone of seeing anything at all!
It looks like there may be some Discourse settings which could be tweaked to make a truly transparent avatar work, but it might be more trouble than it is worth.
Emphasis added:
The core argument against avatars was basically that discussion was the important thing, and avatars (and other graphics) were just distracting. I was vigorously against them. But I finally admitted that, within limits, they added a bit of color, could be fun and clever, and didn’t seem to detract from the discussion.
I fully agree with the argument against the kind of highly distracting avatars and graphics that you see on some forums.
e.g. Here’s a random vBulletin board with totally unacceptable distractions IMHO. They even have huge graphics in signatures.
Nobody in their right mind would want the SDMB to look like that.
But the old SDMB had reasonable avatars, and Discourse has done it right, so that the avatars and graphics enhance the board rather than detracting from it.
I believe you, but I wouldn’t say the argument was put that way by most of the people against it.
My recollection is of many threads requesting avatars inevitably ending with a mod, or even Cecil using his nom de plume, declaring that avatars were for babies or whatever, and that this was a forum about ideas.
If it was just about them being distracting, that would have probably been a more productive conversation. Heck, a compromise could have been to have them toggleable via an option that was off by default (and as I say, the script monkey method was far short of the convenience and reliability of such an option).
Anyway rant over, we’re in the brave new world now 
I’m reading the board on my phone and I have zero trouble seeing and distinguishing any of the avatars in this thread.
Has it occurred to you that your settings are not what LOTS of people here are using?
Same here. I don’t see any distinction between avatars on my iphone and on my chromebook.
Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at some of those old threads debating avatars (and there were many, some with hundreds of posts). I’ll link a few below if anyone’s curious. (It’s ironic seeing all the avatars displayed in an old thread about why we don’t have avatars).
Lynn_Bodoni’s post early in the first linked thread sums up many of the reasons against. A lot of people who opposed enabling avatars (and other images) did so out of fear of what might happen: people might post inappropriate images; bandwidth issues might slow down or break the board when displaying all those images; the boards could become cluttered and horrible-looking like other forums that people have experienced. Now that we’ve had avatars for a while, I think that, mostly, these fears have not been realized (which is not to say that things might not have been different a decade or two ago.)
I just changed my avatar to a transparent PNG, and it works. I don’t know what went awry in your case. I’ll leave this up for today in case anyone wants to download it.
My regular Snoopy avatar has a transparent background, and I know other Dopers have done similar things.
Avatars on my iPad and iPhone 8 are displayed identically, proportional to the screen. Phone view of avatars is clear.
I believe that one of the reasons given, late in the life of that old board, was that The Powers That Be weren’t going to entertain any major updates such as avatars because the software was wonky as hell. Of course this didn’t stop some from asking over and over again why they couldn’t have avatars, as if they could wear down TPTB into giving them what they want.
So it’s not this?
Thanks. Downloaded. I doubt I’ll use it, but just in case.
My objections to avatars was that they can become cliquish. There’s probably no way to avoid that. I haven’t seen people use them for that here yet, but I’ve seen it happen in most places.
I’ve never seen that happen.
I think this was it. But Discourse seems quite robust and uses the avatars in a way that is informative.
Nor have I. (But I don’t get out much.)
IMHO the problem isn’t with the concept of avatars, which I think add a nice touch of customized visual appeal, but with posters who cram too much detail into them which then gets lost in the thumbnail size. It often works best if you use a simple drawing or symbol rather than an actual picture.
There’s a good thread here on the evolution of an avatar, in which some of the issues with that thread’s OP’s original ideas are discussed. The OP eventually came up with a pretty good one, and then @BigT stepped in and edited the image to make it bolder, and added colour. In the end, @Senegoid ended up with a very distinctive and recognizable avatar.
For a while, I strongly considered asking @Senegoid to use an avatar in The Quarantine Zone, as they had the misfortune of having a pink S (they have a non-default avatar now) which made me want to avoid threads where they posted. That has since resolved itself for other reasons.
I didn’t understand any part of this post. Why is a pink ‘S’ a misfortune, why did it drive you from threads, was the resolution due to facing your fears or because the pink S went away?