There is more to the animated GIF in elmwood’s link in Post# 238 than I knew. I shut it down immediately on the second image, the screaming man. From elmwood’s Post# 265 I realized there were four more images to follow. It’s true I overreacted.
I vote no. (And yes, I know they can be turned off.)
Under one condition: I get to approve all of them. And assign the rest.
Oh good gravy, no! All the ones you assign will be screen-shots from Showgirls and Starship Troopers!
Aw come on, avatars could have really enhanced that thread, and made it so much more NSFW.
Mmmmoissst.
I’m willing to bet if there’s a rule restricting avatars to images of medieval/fantasy/RenFaire themes, British comedy skits, or SDMB cliches like death rays and the like, Dopers would be marching on the CL HQ demanding them.
I voted no, but I’d still totally love to have a “Gotcha Ya!” avatar. So yeah, you’re probably right.
Just in case, I’m making my looping gif animation of an airplane on a treadmill right now.
Why not just do a few weeks of an “avatar trial” to see how they work out?
Kind of like we discussed about 120 posts ago?
I think that would be a great way to do it. We could run some time tests and measure some thread sizes, then give everyone a few weeks to build avatars and do it again. That would also show pretty quickly what kind of avatars people would pick.
Why do they have to be so big?
I like the idea of avatars.
They’re 80x80. IMHO, that’s as big as I’d go; it’s the max on my site. Smaller than 64X64, and photos become too pixellated to clearly recognize for many people. Over 100x100, and it becomes overwhelming. 64x64 to 80x80 seems to hit a sweet spot of file size, recognition/flexibility. and tastefulness … at least IMHO.
Also, you can get a lot of detail in 80x80 at 2K or 2.5K. Worst case scenario, if everyone posting in a thread has the largest size avatar, and there’s no members that post more than once on the first page, it’s only 100K to 125K of images. At 100X100, .jpg photo images need to be about 4K to avoid compression noise, so you’re looking at 200K.
Assuming 2,000 active users have avatars, with an average size of 2K each, images would only occupy about three megabytes of database space; that includes metadata.
I’ve been one of the most vocal proponents of avatars in in this thread, but IMHO the 10K to 20K avatars some boards allow is too much. Even 4K is pushing it.
FWIW, I’m not a fan of signature images. I allow small non-animated userbars for paying members on my site, but few actually have one.
Inline images: I could go either way for the SDMB, but if I was in charge here, I’d probably say “no”. On my site, they’re permitted, but they have to be located either in a member gallery, on an image hosting site, or a site that the user has direct control over. Image leeching is a suspendable offense, and accidential Goatse/Tubgirl/Lemonparty/Two Girls One Cup display is grounds for a long suspension or permanent banning. Checking the URLs of images where they appear,and verifying that images aren’t leeched without the consent of the site owner, could be too much work for the mods.
Is this a subjective conclusion? Why your mileage more reliable than mine?
Note ther two occurences of “IMHO” in the paragraph.
I’m cautiously for avatars, because A) I have a custom-made one I like, and B) The poster recognition enhancement factor.
FWIW/IMHO
http://clixim.com/redmeat/1slk_x.gif
ETA = Those are my evil walrus bodyguards. They’re wielding bloody lead pipes.
injokes from elsewhere.
How about let me assign them? Bet I could come up with some nifty ones from certain – hehehe — Southeast Asian websites. 
Sorry 'bout that.
But then, pretty much EVERYTHING’s being repeated here again and again.
Either way-they’re just avatars, people. Jeez.
Nay for reasons previously mentionned.
People should be judged on what they write, in a text message board, your avatar is your name, and it is infinitely flexible.