Today I reluctantly decided to put a poster on Ignore. It’s not her viewpoints, and I’m sure she’s a very nice person; it’s that I find her avatar disturbing and would rather not see it more than I have to. Of course I support her right to use any avatar she likes, so Ignore seems like my only option. But my Ignore options don’t include anything beyond two weeks. Isn’t there a way to ignore someone longer than that? Or do I have to put her on Ignore every two weeks in perpetuity?
If you go to that user’s profile page and set them from “normal” to “ignore” you get options from as little as one day to forever. How are you putting them on ignore?
ETA, it’s possible that being a guest limits your options.
When you get to the two weeks part, scroll down and you will get more dates, including forever.
If you scroll but never see the “Forever” option, it may be there but just a bit off screen. That’s what happened to me.
But that box with a magnifying glass lets you search, so just start typing the word forever, and it will show up for easy selection.
Though, honestly, if their avatar is that disturbing, I’d actually consider a kind PM letting them know and asking if they could modify it or come up with something else.
Plus, well, it won’t go away for you completely even if you block them. It’ll still show up to show they were a frequent or the most recent poster.
You may be better off looking for something that will let you replace the image in your browser.
AdBlock Plus and other browser extensions let you block specific elements on pages. You can block the url that goes to any profile pic you don’t want to see and never see that one again, at least until it gets replaced with a new one with a different filename.
That’s not my experience. I have a few people on Ignore, and all I get is a statement “Ignored Content”. I don’t get an image and I have no idea which of the “dead to me” posters has posted.
Like nelliebly one of them is on ignore because of their avatar.
Their posts go away as you describe. But I see their avatars on the thread list page if they were the last poster or a recent poster (the latter only on desktop).
I actually saw one such avatar not long before posting my previous comment.
I don’t mind so much if the avatar is tiny, as it is on the thread list page if they’re a recent poster. I mean, it’s not ideal, but it’s not so in-my-face, either.
Funny. I was just thinking yesterday that I felt somewhat irrationally put-off by a certain avatar here. I thought about how I might be able to avoid seeing it but I didn’t consider the ignore thing (I’m not that bothered).
I considered contacting the Doper in question but it’s just not the sort of image one can fairly complain about. Probably the avatar is meaningful and pleasant to that Doper and I feel odd that it bugs me.
After reading this thread I kind of wonder if the OP is talking about the same avatar I am but I don’t want to get into PPP here (Personal Poster Preferences).
Several years ago on another board, someone PM’d me to ask me to change my avatar (not the one I use now) because looking at it freaked them out. At the time I was kind of affronted. I did end up changing it, but I took my own sweet time about it, and I never answered the PM.
In retrospect I’m more sympathetic, and I’m glad I made the change, even though I did it grudgingly. But I’m sharing this story to illustrate that a request for an avatar change does have the potential to piss someone off. Some of us don’t have a visceral reaction to visual stimuli unless it’s more extreme than what’s allowable here, so it might come as a surprise that an avatar is unpleasant.
That’s not my experience. The only way I know taht an ignored poster has posted is that there’s a grey dot with a “1” next to a thread I’ve posted to, shwoing that someone has posted, instead of a blue dot with a “1”. But it doesn’t show the avatar, so I’ve got no idea which of my ignorees (there’s a small but select list 
) has posted to it.
It happened with a slow-moving thread a while ago, where the thread kept coming up in the bottom “Suggested Topics” section, and every time it came up I thougth “I wish someone else would post already!” But if I looked at that thread in the forum section, or opened it and looked at the info beneath the first entry, it didn’t show the avatar of an ignoree.
The only time I know that an ignoree has posted is if someone else quotes their post. Then the avatar is in the quote box, but no text, so I know that Ignoree X has posted something.
Strange - my experience with posters on ignore is the same as BigT’s, not the way you’re describing.
I just wanted to stress @Ponderoid’s solution. Adblocking software of various ilks lets you block specific elements you find objectionable, and thus you can block the avatar images you dislike, without blocking the poster. In the case of the software I use, it’s as easy as right-clicking on the image and selecting the right option.
As an aside, while I’m reasonably sure it’s not my image offending people, if people do find it questionable, I’d rather somebody brought it up to me in private rather than just blocking me. I’d rather be reasonable as practical.
WAG-it may depend on the theme you’re using.
I haven’t been able to block specific avatars on my phone, which is where I do most of my browsing.
I have one poster on Ignore. I can see her avatar within threads: next to her posts, inside other posts next to her quoted posts (which still don’t show content, thank you very much) and in the place at the bottom of the first post where it shows frequent posters. I am using Sam’s Simple Theme.
I wonder if we’re all referring to the same poster… 
Wait, what if it’s me? 
I honestly have no clue. I like coffee, I have nobody blocked, and I kind of want to know who we’re all teasing-around-the-edges of talking about without sticking my nose out that far.
Yeah it was actually on this board where I first learned about trypophobia, which I never knew was a thing but seemed to have an affect on several people that were on this board.
Everyone has something that bugs them. I’ve seen a poster express distaste for using the names of historical personages as user names 
. While I’d probably shrug off politely any request to change my user name to make someone more comfortable, I have occasionally changed how I present myself here. After a little stubborn heel-digging I eventually stopped signing my posts which some people seemed to find an annoying practice (the complaints were usually aimed specifically at Shodan, but it was expressed as a general annoyance so I took the hint). Avatars, as I’ve noted, are pretty meaningless to me so that sort of request wouldn’t bother me.
But just like some people get bugged by little things, some people are deeply attached to little things. So I could easily see someone getting their back up.
I doubt it, the avatar of the person I have on ignore is pretty boring. I only mentioned it because I seemed to be having a different experience from some other posters and I thought it would provide another data point. I wasn’t dancing around the person’s ID, but I guess I could have been more careful about not identifying the gender.