Okay...

I have been wanting to use an Avatar that is sitting on my hard drive...
I have looked at the Help and it seems that the system allows this, but I have yet to actually figure it out, as I have been unable to find an appropriate function to load it into my profile...

Apparently I have missed something, but am not sure what... Anyone got any possible hints to point me in the right direction?

Thanks for the Help

Keep the Faith

You don't.

The mods have determined they are only allowing the existing ones already in the forum database, and are not adding more.



-karma

KarmaInferno is correct, at least for the time being. Maybe one of the older mods can comment on their reasoning.

Also, I'm moving this to the correct forum.

Thanks KarmaInferno... I knew that I could not be going insane there...

and Thanks Method...

Keep the Faith

Because, without a cap, new avatars would continually be added by new people and old people who want a change? That could potentially be a lot of storage space used up.

...and It's only a matter of time before every thread is saturated with animated gif avatars and the ambiance is ruined.

Or gif animations of LS cops riding unicorns... <shudder>

And then there are the avatars that bump our PG-13 rating well into the multiple X category.

One could allow linked avatars, uploaded somewhere else like this. Also avatars are commonly limited to about 20k bits.



So what? Let's get some cyperpunk feeling like we have at Pegasus' in-game forum.



I've never seen this happen in my decade at several forums.

You're one of the lucky few then. I've seen several avatars in the past that ranged from inappropriate to squik. (Using the goatse pic as an avatar for instance)

Where do you frequent? I've spent time on forums of many types and I've never seen avatars out of place. Sure some forums had more "adult" avatars but then that sites nature implied such.

To be clear: We have members who consider the requirement to post in a civil manner a violation of their right as a human to post as they please, an attempt to censor their expression and us oppressing them. Given that we are way to busy simply dealing with that silliness already, we are not about to add more work for ourselves dealing with users who refuse to restrict themselves to an avatar that conforms to the TOS and is not obscene.

Sorry, but this is simply not a can of worms we are willing to open.

We are slow to add new and shiny things here at DS. We just allowed Avatars a couple years ago

In all seriousness though, the decision not to allow custom avatars was based on both what Redjack said there, and a desire to have a somewhat Unified theme for the board Avatars (i.e., SHadowrun Avatars).

Bull

Back when I played Everquest, our unofficial server message board tended to have avatars that were offensive all the time. Animated avatars of people flipping off the camera, avatars calling for violence against political figures, hate messages against religions, etc etc. Granted, this wasn't the standard across the board, just a few select users. But it only takes a few to ruin it for everyone.

Do I wish I could put my own avatar here? Yeah. Does it bug me that I am forced to use a SR themed avatar? Not in the least.

So, with a trippy little picture that Klaus drew in my 4th Ed book I'd like to use as my Avatar, I got to thinking. The DS admins don't want a free-for all on pictures, so we need a way to monitor that. But we don't want to just assign it to the Admins, because that's too much work. But what if that became a perk you could pay for, to help DS continue upon its merry quest to spread Shadowrun to all the good boys and girls? Is that a possibility?

Personally I think multiple-row signatures with formatting, colors and quotes are as annoying as animated avatars, and they are in between the text-flow area where I read what people post. They can be turned off, but so can avatars. The problem with turning off signatures is that a few people use them for good info/links in a single unformatted row, which is what I'd prefer them to be. Most people just use them as an extended mean to their personalization of the post, i.e no different from avatars.