UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback Avatars

Hmm, is it just me, or is the avatar system in this program not very user friendly, and not very effective all the time? I think 99% of all my emails and PMs have to do with avatars, why they aren't showing up, why their images become stretched, etc...

Also, I notice the way it works is each user has their image as xxx.jpg, according to their number. Well, this is great and all, but most of the time when a user updates avatars, it simply overwrites the file and stays the same name. So most of the time the browser cache is still using the old image, so they complain they can't see their new avatar, etc.

And you have cases where a person's avatar is there one day, and suddenly the next day it is a red X, and then when they try to upload it, they still encounter problems, etc.

I just wonder if there are any changes to be made to this system in the future, or other suggestions to make it better, since I spend so much time dealing with troubleshooting avatars I can't answer other more important questions.

The new 6.1 boards seem to be sizing them correctly. New uploaded ones at least. As far as caching goes, add a message to the editbasic.tmpl to remind them to clear their cache? Or you can use my forum avatar hack which will not have a cache problem if they change avatars, or you can only let them link to a url for avatar which would eliminate the problem.

I will look into your hack, thanks. I used to have it so they could externally link to avatars, but unfortunately, my group of members are not computer savvy and most don't have places to host images. Which is what the photo gallery we have is for, people can upload images there, and it even makes thumbnails, etc.

But I'll check yours out, thanks

You might check into Josh's forum for some helper threads that would explain avatars and other things more easily to your users. Would probably save you some answering...

I wouldn't want to see the way the user picture uploads are named change as it allows for easy tracking by their user number. If you allowed storage of any named file the possiblity exists that two users could upload the same named file and then if one decides to change their photo the other would lose theirs. Perhaps placing a reminder next to the upload field saying they may have to view their profile and refresh their page to see the new photo.

The photo's used to be stored as uid-somepic.jpg but I forget why that was changed. This would help prevent the caching problem provided the pictures had different names or extentions.

I had forgotten but a more detailed explanation to Avatars was suggested.

I've got some info on that included in how to update profiles etc... but maybe I'll work up something more specific.... also mentioning the cache is a good idea.

Any more suggestions are welcome.

As far as I remember, the reason it was changed was because if the avatar gif was called anything you like, as "userId_mydog.gif", when you wanted to upload a different pic as "userId_me.gif" you´d end up with two avatars on the system. This means you could end up uploading hundreds of avatars, taking server system resources.

If the system then deleted "userId_mydog.gif" when uploading "userId_me.gif" then all previous links would be broken. On the other hand, now these are called dynamically, so you could probably start referencing the new gif url rather than making url static and only changing the file itself.