About the difference between having my picture somewhere on a webpage and having it automatically appear with the avatar script: suppose I had a picture of me somewhere on the internet, and someone finds it and starts posting immediately after me every time I post, saying “here’s Arnold’s picture”. The two situations are not the same. In the first case someone has to make an effort to find my picture. In the second case it’s automatically served up to them. I might prefer that someone would actually have to make the effort.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. 
Thank you for that Arnold. It’s important to note as I have already, very few people with avatars displaying have ever had an image from the image gallery displayed because they already had a profile picture or added their own avatar choice to their profiles or added “none” as their choice. In all those cases, the script doesn’t know if they have an image on the gallery and doesn’t care. It hasn’t ever displayed it to avatar users if they do, and it never would if they just did “nothing” about it at all.
Out of those few remaining who are still active users, have shared an image on the gallery, have not uploaded a profile picture, avatar text, or “none” in their profiles, some gallery images currently appear and that will be redone in a way that it isn’t automatic in a future update ASAP. Many of those who were in this situation saw the avatar and said 'Well, you know that’s not a bad thing, I did put it there because I wanted to share it after all" and all but one has left that as their chosen avatar. That means turning that feature off now will remove avatars that posters themselves have approved and decided to use - more than there are posters currently complaining about this. Only one poster so far that I know of decided they didn’t want to have that displayed as their avatar and blocked it by adding “none” to their profile, and even they said it was totally cool with them that it found it, after all it was put there so they could share it, they just had their own reasons for not wanting it to be their avatar. Free choice - it’s a beautiful thing.
Anyway that leaves really very few people that are actually displaying a gallery image that they themselves didn’t ‘approve’ for the use of avatar viewers. And at any time, for all this time, all of them and everyone else has always been able to prevent it with the simplest of mechanisms. Far, far simpler than posting 40 times in a thread hand waving and running in circles and making me far less willing to try to help them understand than I have been in the past.
As an aside to all - working on this dope-search feature I had the opportunity to read every single picture thread that has ever been posted here. And there are hundreds if you count ones like ‘show us your new glasses’, ‘show us your haircut’, ‘how did you look then and now?’ etc. I spent most of my TGiving holiday reading all of these with my eyes, not a script, and in almost every single one Arnold stepped up to say “you know a whole bunch of us sure love sharing photos and over time these links get broken and lost, and it would be a shame to lose them, and I would be willing to host them for you so you can share them the right way.” He has done a lot of work and maintains a busy schedule adding and removing and editing photos that people are putting there because they want to share them. In none of those threads, once, did anyone ever say “Arnold this is cool but are you going to assure us that nobody else will ever see this image later, ever, maybe in some way or by using some device we don’t even know about now?” But if they had he would have obviously said no I can’t assure that unless you want me to password protect the site and erase all the photos and that would kind of defeat the purpose of it being there to share photos.
Now, today, not only those original threads themselves, but the gallery too are all part of the internet’s history. They are legally archived and cross-sectioned and re-published to web searchers, teachers, historians, and avatar users around the world using whatever devices, scripts, browser add-ons or otherwise they want. If Arnold shut down the gallery today, erased his servers and deleted his DNS entries those portraits will still live on the internet forever. That is just the reality. Unlike what has been inferred by some, I don’t take particular joy in shoving reality down the throats of those who don’t want to accept it but I just don’t think I should have to pretend reality isn’t reality in order to accommodate their unrealistic view.
The ability to see images from the web as suggest avatars will be optional in all cases (as soon as it can be implemented) This means someone who turns on a feature to automatically suggest avatars might wind up seeing some from the Portrait Gallery or somewhere it has been archived or linked to and those are beyond even my or Arnold’s control. If you check the Alexa web stats there are 100 other websites that link to Arnold’s gallery right now. Are users of the SDMB writing those webmasters and insisting that they be notified if any of their visitors click those links? It will be up to the script users to decide if they want to use the feature. I won’t prevent script users from being able to see gallery images specifically and I can’t even if I wanted to, but the part of the script that makes that easy to do will be an option that is off by default. It will be up to script users to consider all the arguments in these threads and decide how they want to use it, or not use it.
In the mean time without any updates necessary, any and all concerned (the whole 3 or 4 of them) have always been able to choose their own, different avatar or none at all at their whim.
My analogy is more like this: suppose I enjoyed browsing the image gallery as I read posts so I could take a gander at the poster while I read, and to save myself some time I bookmark the images. So I’m reading Arnold’s post and I go to my bookmarks and choose “Arnold” and see his portrait. Over time I’ve done this with 150 different users and it’s a mess of bookmarks and open windows and I think ‘you know I could write a little script so that when I see one of these posts, it just opens the corresponding bookmark for me.’ Then I don’t need to remember which bookmark it was, or what I named it and it will just always open the right one. Then I tell a group of friends "hey this is nifty - if you are like me and like to open bookmarks to images while reading the dope this will save you a bunch of time and hassle’ And I give them my bookmark list and a little script. It isn’t following posters around adding a link to their portrait in a public post, it is offering a tool to help those who want to use it do something they want to do and could do and are already doing but in a more cumbersome way.
But all that said it isn’t that big of a deal. Almost everyone that wants to share an image via the portrait gallery has also wanted to share images in message threads, and has also wanted to share an image in their user profile, and many also share an avatar via text they added to their profiles, so it really leaves only a very small number of “affected” gallery users who all have the option to ‘opt-out’ if they really care anyway.
So, the plan, when it can be added, is to make things more optional in the script. Users may wind up finding those few image gallery images if they enable a feature to suggest avatars from the web, but it will be entirely up to them if they want to, and if they do, it will be entirely up to them to consider the arguments both pro and con posted in these threads and make that choice themselves.
100% your choice on that, but if I may recommend - personally I think a Shamrockor shillelagh would also be nice alternatives. 
You raise a good point Bobbie - even if you didn’t mean to. Notice that Arnold has an avatar that is not from the portrait gallery, but from his user profile here. Such is the case with a very large number of portrait gallery users. The type who is inclined to share a picture in one way *usually *likes sharing pictures other ways too and the SDMB only makes so many ways available.
There have been several posters in this thread yelling the loudest who had the same situation and by erasing their profile pictures in disgust actually caused their gallery image to be selected instead, when previously the script never knew it existed. :smack:
When the script started linking to photos from a NSFW doper thread, you stopped it rather than saying they have the option of shutting it down themselves because you understood that those photos were posted to a specific thread for a reason and the posters may not have wanted them bandied about the site as a regular thing. Why is the idea that a poster may view a photo from a different SFW thread so outrageous?
I didn’t allow any NSFW images to be default-assigned mostly because avatar viewers might not want to see them. I did consider the posters too and tried to allow only images people would or should be proud of, but I would never have elected for them not to have any avatar at all if only one was available (except in the case of NSFW). One example was a perfectly nice and suitable image selected but in my own reading of the thread later, I saw that poster said “wait, I want to retract that image and show you this one instead” because they liked it better. I manually edited the script and put in the one that they preferred, despite knowing they probably would never know, see it or care, but as an avatar user I would prefer to see the one they preferred. If I had no guidance at all I would still rather see one than nothing at all and would choose whatever was available.
We’ve gone around in circles on this so I don’t expect a clear resolution but the simplest way I can put it is that it isn’t about the poster who gets an avatar assigned and doesn’t even use or see avatars, it is about the viewers. Unless a poster is a viewer it has no impact on them anyway and I was fairly honorable about choosing flattering images where possible despite not being required to. If they are a viewer, they would have already selected their own, and if they aren’t a viewer but someone has called their attention to something they didn’t know about, causing them to be affected when they wouldn’t otherwise have been, then they have the option to select their own or choose none too.