I see no avatar so that worked, but you should absolutely be able to use something like SDMB Avatar: http://whatever where whatever is anything that doesn’t resolve to an image, without having to actually upload a blank image somewhere. But you might need to wait up to an hour for the changes to take effect once you make a change to your profile.
One note in general, if you just do a Google image search for ‘jragon’ the same image is returned - the script isn’t revealing anything that was intended to be private - but I agree everyone should be able to have or not have an avatar as they choose. The script is written to always follow the profile text even if there are other images available online or in your built-in SDMB profile picture.
Oh, it’s not meant to be private at all. I wouldn’t have uploaded it if I had any need of privacy. It’s in the gallery in case people are curious. I just don’t like it next to my name when I post.
Just out of curiosity, is this automatically linking somehow to the photo on the photo gallery site? I don’t have an image uploaded like it says in the OP but somehow the primary picture on the gallery is showing as my avatar and I can’t seem to get it to go away.
The order of preference the avatar server follows when determining what avatar to show users of the script for a given poster is:
Custom assigned avatar - If a user of the script assigns a custom avatar to any poster that avatar will be displayed to them in that poster’s posts regardless of any of the following.
Lacking a custom avatar assigned by the script user, the first place it looks is the poster’s SDMB profile text - If the profile text contains "SDMB Avatar: ", whatever is listed as that URL is what the script will try to display to script users. If the url is a link to an actual image then that image is what the script will display but if the url is ‘none’, or anything that doesn’t resolve to an image, the script will display no avatar for that poster and won’t go on to additional steps below.
If there is no custom avatar assigned by the user, and no URL specified in the poster’s SDMB profile text, the system then displays the poster’s built-in SDMB profile picture if they have one uploaded. This is only available to paying members, mods and admins but there are quite a few of those.
If there is no profile picture in the SDMB profile, the system may pick up any image available anywhere to display as a default avatar for that poster. This could include Google images, Facebook, personal websites, image galleries, links posted in “picture threads”, etc.
So the simplest answer to your specific question is: If you are running the avatar script to see avatars but don’t want to see your own default image by your posts, just select a different avatar via your profile text, profile picture, or block it by adding a custom avatar line to your copy of the script.
If you’re using the avatar script to view avatars but don’t want other users of the avatar script to see whatever default image the script has selected, simply add text to your SDMB profile to select a different image, or none at all at your whim.
If you aren’t using the avatar script to view avatars, don’t worry about what others who do use it see when they use it. It won’t impact your board experience in any way. But you can still add an SDMB Avatar line to your profile to override any default avatar the system is displaying to script users if it really is a concern, even if you don’t use the script.
In all cases from top to bottom, the user of the script can of course assign any custom avatar to your posts and there isn’t any way to prevent that, but only they see it by your posts.
… that I don’t want cluttering up the other ATMB thread. This seems the more appropriate thread.
In that thread, Crazyhorse said:
I’ve wanted to have some sort of ‘avatar-like’ symbol next to user names that will signal a poster’s category, as assigned by me, such as: ‘likely idiot’, ‘likely valuable contribution’, likely good story of dubious accuracy’, etc. Also, as you mentioned in that post, ‘this clown has been banned’. My question is, does your script (I don’t currently use it, and haven’t downloaded it, so can’t check myself without excessive time and effort) enable me to assign a pic stored on my local HD to someone? I don’t want to rely on any external service to host the pix, and I’ve got plenty of free Gigs on my HD, and I can’t imagine that taking up even 1 GB, even if I have 1 image for each user who’s ever been active. All I want is a way to assign posters into categories that are instantly visually identifiable.
And I don’t care if an ‘avatar’ shows up next to users I haven’t assigned the ‘avatard’ to, nor do I care if nothing shows up next to one of those unassigned posters. I might even give myself the ‘avatard’ as an avatar, just for shits and grins.
Does your script allow assignment of locally stored pix?
Yes you can do that and it’s pretty useful and fun. As it is right now you can assign any avatar you want to any specific user but it doesn’t have a built-in grouping type thing like you are describing except for one case: banned users. So you can easily assign one image to be displayed for all banned users by editing just one line of the script.
To add other users to your various categories it would have to be done one user at a time. e.g. one line added to the script for each user you want to categorize with a common avatar.
So if you have an avatar in mind to assign to “likely idiot”, “likely good poster”, “hardline conservative”, “moderator”, or whatever, you can easily assign your chosen avatar to each poster you want to have display that one avatar.
I would need to experiment to find out if you can use a local image instead of a hosted one for this purpose. I’m pretty sure it should be possible and maybe even as easy as specifying it like: “File://C:/my images/goodposter.jpg” instead of “Http://website/goodposter.jpg”, but I haven’t tried it yet and can’t promise it works. I can try it out later and post the results.
Its really fast and easy to host some images at photobucket or imageshack though, in case that won’t work.
As per Crazyhorse’s offer, I’ll present my bug report.
I successfully installed and uninstalled the script last summer once or twice. But later that season, the script seemed to stop working for me: installation wouldn’t produce any avatars, even if I kept it going for a couple of days. No worries: I was motivated by idle curiosity, and not a desire for a permanent browser feature. I intermittantly tried installing this during the Fall without success.
Ad-block Plus 2.1,
(show tabs on flash and java, count filter hits- my ad-block list is small and custom - I mostly rely on my beloved flashblock)
Chrome View
Download Helper
DownloadThemAll
Flashblock
FoxClocks
GreaseMonkey 1.5
IV View Lite
Nuke Anything Enhanced
OperaView
Read It Later
Toolbar Buttons - I have a Java and a Javascript button - the latter is typically engaged. See the far left side of the screenshot.
I tried the “Save 136815.user.js to disc and drop it into the browser” trick. The browser tells me it was successfully installed. But still no avatars.
Puzzling. Please accept this report as FYI only. As it happens, I was just able to complete a successful install in Chrome, by dropping the file on to the extensions page, accessed via the Settings option on the menu. (Nice avatar, btw. )
Yeah, apparently Chrome made this change somewhat recently for added security. So you can’t just drag and drop a userscript into any Chrome window, it has to be dropped into the actual Extensions page, as you say.
Measure for Measure, it sounds like one of those add-ons you have in Firefox may be somehow interfering with user scripts. If it’s working fine in Chrome and you don’t care to figure it out then all is well. If you want to try to find out what is going on with FF, I would disable all extensions and add-ons except Greasemonkey, see if it works and if so add them back one at a time to find the culprit.
FTR only:
I tried that, and I got the same symptoms. I loaded another script from userscripts and that one worked. Odd. I’m guessing it’s something squirrely in my about:config page. Anyway, I’m going to abandon this project unless somebody else has the same problem. Then I’ll consider diving back in.
Hi all, just as an FYI - the feature that suggests avatars from the SDMB portrait gallery has been turned off at the request of the gallery administrator. When the feature for suggesting avatars from around the web in general returns it may find gallery or other images to suggest, but it will be an option that script users need to turn on if they want to use it.
In the mean time there were several posters who wanted to use their gallery images as avatars and those will now be lost, so just a reminder that it has always been OK with the gallery administrator to do so if you want. The only difference is you need to add the URL to that image to your SDMB profile yourself, or upload it as your profile picture here.
BTW, the avatar-locator service has moved to a new server. I think I’ve managed to do it in phases that make everything work continuously, so nobody should have seen any problems. Coincidentally, I’m getting around to switching domain registrars and that is in progress. The DNS changes are the ones I’m most likely to screw up (don’t do them very often) and they’re also the ones that, if I screw them up, they affect things for hours. So if you see any problems loading avatars in the next day or so (the domain transfer is a bit unpredictable), that’s probably what’s up.
A few people have PM’ed recently because the link to the SDMB Avatar script at userscripts.org isn’t working. A few searches indicate it’s down for everyone, but can still be reached by appending port 8080 to the URLs. So the avatar script is available there at : http://userscripts.org:8080/scripts/show/136815
But userscripts.org seems to be in a bad state of neglect and disrepair in general, so the avatar script is now also hosted at Greasyfork (SDMB Avatars)
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