I PMed the guy months ago and never got a reply.
Besides, it’s stupid to have to have a script to do something which vBulletin already does.
Not to flog a dead horse here, but I thought it was clear that vBulletin does NOT do this.
With vBulletin, you can choose your own avatar, which others see by your posts.
With this script, you can choose avatars for other people, which you see by your posts.
That’s a HUGE difference.
Well that’s worse in my opinion.
“Worse” is a very subjective value judgment. It certainly is more work. For me to use the greasemonkey script, first I have to know something about greasemonkey to know what I’m even doing. Then I have to install the script. Then I have to find images I wish to assign to other members, and then manually insert the link to that image in the greasemonkey script that I barely understand. And do that for each user. And hope I have access to those images in the future. I could host them on my harddrive, but then what if I have them stored at home and am browsing from work? Can I get them? Have to install the greasemonkey script at work, too?
What happens if I borrow a different computer? Those avatars are no longer showing. So all my hard work is useless unless I do all my browsing from the same machine.
With the vB inherent system, each user selects their own avatar, if they wish one, and then that file is always available from wherever. I don’t have to learn some alternate code or plug in, don’t have to install software, don’t have to dig up image files. Just pick one for myself, if I care. All the hard work is done by the system itself.
Of course, I’m stuck with whatever avatar people choose for themselves, and that’s if they bother. What if I have poster Johnny123 and JohnnyX and Johnny_321 all posting, and none of them bother to upload an avatar? One of the main reasons offered by avatar lovers is that it helps distinguish similar posters. But if they don’t bother, it won’t help. Whereas with the greasemonkey script, I the user can impose an avatar on each of them - Johnny123 is a monkey and JohnnyX is a hat and Johnny_321 is a racecar. So what if Johnny123 hates monkeys? He’ll never know.
The nice thing about the greasemonkey script is it allows the user to pick the avatar, so it’s something that person associates with that member and thus makes the memory associations stronger. Can also only worry about specific posters that confuse him and not bother with the rest, if desired. It also allows avatars when the system has them turned off.
So pick your poison.
If the board allowed the use of the built-in avatars anyone could still run a GM script and select their own avatars to assign to others whenever they wanted.
The board chooses not to allow avatars for whatever reasons and this script could serve as a workaround to that limitation. Being able to select any image and assign it to a poster is a coincidental feature of this workaround, but I think the original hope was that we could keep a semi-updated list of avatars that people have selected for themselves if desired.
Trying to keep a list constantly updated via a thread or somesuch would be cumbersome and prone to inaccuracy and mass loss of interest, so the question became how we could keep such a list centralized and easy to update - ideally in a way that a given poster could just paste a URL to their desired avatar in their profile and have the script find that URL and display their avatar.
That is too much work for GM to do and it would make the script very slow, but the cgi that **ntucker **wrote to parse SDMB Avatar information from the user profiles works quickly, and would be a feasible workaround. The GM script just needs to be modified to run a given poster’s user ID through the cgi and the cgi will return a path to an avatar image if they have one listed in their profile. Then it would be automatic with no need to keep an updated list. If a poster puts a URL in their profile it automagically appears to other users of the script without entering any code or URL’s or anything. Users of the script could always modify specific posters and select their own avatar for them if they desire. I see more value in most cases in being able to see the avatar one selected for themselves.
As far as I know so far my profile and Polerius’ are the only ones that include links to our selected avatars. The development of a new script probably won’t go any further than this unless others who want to have an avatar also update their profiles with the URL. If a lot of people have them, **Polerius **would hopefully consider modifying the script to use the cgi and we would have some semblance of the feature that the board already has built-in as it was intended. Additionally everyone always has the ability to use GM to assign their own selected avatars to other posters. We don’t really need **Polerius **or **ntuckers **help with that.
That does seem to be the case. Looking at my database, 727 different user profiles have been checked and only 2 have avatar urls in their profiles. Bit of a chicken and egg problem – there isn’t much reason to use the script if people aren’t putting their avatar urls in their profiles, and there isn’t much reason to put your avatar url in your profile if nobody’s using the script.
If you are talking about what vBulletin calls “Profile Pictures,” I’ve had one in my profile for a long time. It is an uploaded image, however, not a URL.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:87, topic:598062”]
If you are talking about what vBulletin calls “Profile Pictures,” I’ve had one in my profile for a long time. It is an uploaded image, however, not a URL.
[/quote]
Mods, Admins, Charter Members, and SDSAB Members all have the ability to upload or link to an avatar image through vBulletin in the proper way. So your avatar is connected to your User ID here without even having to use any scripts, although we would still need GM to display it anywhere since the individual forums on the board also don’t allow the display of avatars - even among those who are allowed to add one to their profiles directly.
The GM script can accomplish this for mere mortal users who aren’t allowed to even upload or link to an avatar if they post a link to their selected avatar in their profile instead, such as has been done in mine (e.g. ‘SDMB Avatar: ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs’ is actually typed into the “Bio” section of my profile because I can’t upload an image or link a URL directly.)
So if everyone who wanted an avatar posted a link to their avatar in their SDMB profile, the GM script could automatically display those avatars without anyone needing to know how to edit the script. No need to update it or add names, etc. It would be as automatic to the user as the built-in avatars. The only difference is it requires the user to type the URL to their avatar in some other area of their SDMB profile (like “Bio”) instead of typing it into the proper avatar section of their SDMB profile (which isn’t available to most users.)
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:87, topic:598062”]
If you are talking about what vBulletin calls “Profile Pictures,” I’ve had one in my profile for a long time. It is an uploaded image, however, not a URL.
[/QUOTE]
No, as I mentioned above, I am talking about the avatars people stick in their bio sections as crazyhorse mentions. The url to the official vbulletin avatar is used as a last resort, but I do not track whether or not there is actually an avatar there, because vbulletin returns an image whether you have an avatar or not (if you don’t, the result is a 1x1 pixel white image).