Avatar shape—theme dependent

[LSLGuy]

Somehow I’m not surprised that happened. Disappointed, but not surprised.

[SuntanLotion]

Its square again!

[Topologist]

It looks the various problems people have noticed have been fixed. I expect they fixed the problem that @Reply noticed seemed to be the root of the problem.

[Atamasama]

[John_DiFool]

@LSLGuy

It looks very little like vBulletin used to. But now 5 years after the switch to Discourse, I really don’t care what vBulletin looked like. When I visit other vBulletin-based boards I find the look & feel positively antiquated.

I wish we still had our original lineup of VB smilies tho; the Discourse ones tend to be generic and uninteresting and apparently aren’t customizable unless I am mistaken on that point. Some people have made some really awesome VB smilies over the years.

[Reply]

Discourse, the software, does support custom emoji, and in fact someone even ported a bunch of the vBulletin ones over. On a “normal” Discourse forum where the forum admins/owners are available and interested, it wouldn’t be very hard to set up.

However, I think in our case… um… the SDMB is apparently just hiding in some forgotten corner of our owner’s accounting, mostly ignored, and from what I understand, it’s best not to poke the beast…? See the discussion at Can we consider allowing direct image uploads?. I think the overall consensus in that thread is (my paraphrase) “We’re lucky to have the forum at all, hosted at no charge to us, and it’s best if we don’t do anything to risk that”.

On the other hand, hopefully the theme stuff is something our moderators (as opposed to the site owners) can (and apparently did?) fix on their own.

[EllisDee]

@John_DiFool

I wish we still had our original lineup of VB smilies tho; the Discourse ones tend to be generic and uninteresting and apparently aren’t customizable unless I am mistaken on that point. Some people have made some really awesome VB smilies over the years.

In fairness, I recall similar sentiments when we were still on vBulletin. Smashy, in particular, was an oft-mentioned lost smiley.

The one I do miss is the old rolleyes. It hit much harder than the we have now.

EDIT: Looks like the old rolleyes went away back in 2014, years before the move to discourse.

Did the old rolleyes smiley cause an increase in suicides or something?

I guess I haven’t been paying attention- I only have so much time and don’t always read the ATMB. Can you provide links to these other threads? Maybe if we could provide enough weight of sentiment it would sway the powers that be to yield to the demands of us little people.

EDIT 2: Sudden wave of sadness seeing TubaDiva in that old thread from 2014. She was a good egg,

[LSLGuy]

Delivered us here to the promised land she did and then died on the beach, her feet still wet with seawater from that final swim.

RIP dear; we owe you far more than you were ever thanked for.

[BigT]

@Topologist

It looks the various problems people have noticed have been fixed. I expect they fixed the problem that @Reply noticed seemed to be the root of the problem. ⁢

Good to know. I checked my script and it’s still compatible, and makes like a very small change I like: the banner text is just a bit smaller and looks better to me, so I’m keeping it unless people object.

And, if you do for some reason want the circular avatars, the option to enable them still wo

(The main two thing I use the script for myself is that I disabled the scrolling avatars, and I like using Arial SS01 which has different characters for capital i and lowercase L, but otherwise looks the same.)