No Avatars Here? Why?

[Crazyhorse]

@Guinastasia

Are you talking about a picture of me in the profile space? Or when they talked about taking our pictures from the SDMB gallery and having them along side our posts. Because that wouldn’t have been an issue, as I already have a picture there. If you mean the grease-monkey script, I must confess, it seemed very confusing to me, so I opted not to use it.
Also, I believe at the time, I wasn’t a member, and only members can have a picture in their profile. (Someone purchased me a membership, I have no idea who, or why)

This was a greasemonkey script that would just require you to type one line of text into your SDMB profile. You would just paste the URL to any image you have hosted anywhere and it would be displayed to anyone else running the greasemonkey script. Likewise you would see the avatar anyone else placed a URL to in their profile.

The post below from the thread I linked earlier explains the format that you use or you can just see it in my profile. (you don’t need to know any of the technical details in the quote to use the script, that is all stuff the greasemonkey script would handle automatically.

The only problem was that after finally arriving at this ingenious solution, nobody expressed any interest in using it and as far as I know **Polerius **never released the last update to the script to connect it to the user profile. The whole thing just kind of fizzled out and was forgotten due to lack of interest even though the avatar thread raged on for days.

@ntucker

Here’s a fun little thing I whipped up: A CGI which takes a numerical userid as a parameter and redirects to that SDMB user’s avatar URL, as found in the user’s profile (it first checks for an “SDMB Avatar: <url>” entry like here, and if not, it returns the standard SDMB profile pic URL, which ends up being a 1x1 pixel white image if the user has no profile pic or if you’re not logged in.

You can use it blindly for an <img> tag like this:

<img src="http://splitter.august20th.com/sdmbav.rb?userid=79856">

(for the nerds: it grabs and parses profile pages on-demand, caching the found urls in a database. It won’t re-snarf a profile page if it’s gotten it within the past hour.)