Until that program grabs the profile picture and uses it as an avatar, it is still only a profile picture. There is no contradiction in that sentence.
Well, the irony is obvious with whomever you’re telling to calm down. Unless it’s yourself.
We are perfectly calm-you added the exclamation points when you restated what TubaDiva said.
Is it the same picture that - if displaying avatars in threads was enabled here - would be pulled into the thread and show up next to each user’s post? If so, then it’s an avatar.
Unless you’re going to say that this image is called a “profile picture” on the user’s control panel, but suddenly becomes an “avatar” only when the “show this image in threads” feature is turned on. Which is kind of nuts and I’m not even sure what the point is of making the distinction.
“Profile picture” is included in the set of things that are avatars.
Edit: I’m glad everybody is calm now.
Profile picture=avatar. You can argue about it but you’ll be wrong.
Mind the gap.
This reminds me of when I tried to convince my mother-in-law that AOL was not the same thing as “the Internet.”
What if the program were designed somehow to pull the picture from an online data base of drivers license pictures. Until the pictures are pulled and used to accompany individual posts on this board, they are still only drivers license pictures.
This may help us discriminate between profile pic and avatar.
Say you didn’t have the script, so you have no little pic by your name in a thread. But you do have a pic in your profile. Do you call it your avatar when referring to it, or do you call it your profile pic.
To ward off quibbling: If you have a pic in your profile that also shows up in avatar position with your posts. How do you distinguish between the two of the?
On a practical note, consider how we’re all every effectively and uniformly distinguishing the meanings here. Think practical.
No. The moment they are pulled online and associated with a username in any way they become avatars. The place they are displayed online does not matter.
This may help us discriminate between profile pic and avatar.
If you have a pic in your profile that also shows up in avatar position with your posts, how do you distinguish them? I.e., what terms do you use to contrast the two?
On a practical note, consider how we’re effectively and uniformly distinguishing the meanings here in this thread. Think pragmatics. Think living language.
It’s not a “program”, it’s a script.
Isn’t this fun?
Can I play?
**Czarcasm **is not a mod, but when he moderates he…
We don’t. Why do we need to? There is a picture that represents me on Internet forums, peer-to-peer chat programs and other places. It’s the same picture whether you’re looking at it in my public profile or next to my posts. That’s my avatar.
In Yahoo Messenger, you can upload an avatar to your profile. When you send a message to somebody, that image gets pasted next to your messages. It’s no different here. It doesn’t get a different name just because you haven’t sent any messages yet.
I’m not even sure how it’s germane to this topic, but I will accept a dictionary or wiki definition if somebody wants to grab one. I’m on my phone and can’t easily cut n paste between the wiki app and tapatalk.
You can actually have a separate “Profile Picture” (which is a type of avatar) and “SDMB Avatar” which the script will display. You just add the “SDMB Avatar: …” line to your profile and the script will use that one, while ignoring the avatar which vBulletin refers to as a “Profile Picture.”
The way you were stating it as a fact, I thought that you already had a dictionary definition picked out.
These posts made my day. It’s like a modern day Monty Python skit.