We're experimenting with larger avatars, and I'm wondering what a good size would be.
Here's my classic Gryphon avatar:
(http://www.loamhedgeabbey.com/avatars/Members/James_Gryphon_1.png)
And here's a few different sizes in the attachments below, 80, 100, 120, and 150 respectively.
I think 150 is clearly too big, but below that and it's more ambiguous. I like 100 because it's a big, round number, and is memorable, but 80 might be good if you think 100 is a bit much. I've seen 120 on another forum, and it doesn't seem too overpowering there, but every forum is different, hence this discussion.
Personally, I favor 120. It gets in detail the other sizes don't have.
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Yeah, 120 is nice. Would let me have much clearer profile pics in the future.
120 seems nice to me.
120 or 100 looks good to me.
It appears I'm the sole dissenting opinion at the moment. I like the 80. I can see other users' avatars well without being overwhelmed by them. I've also never hated gif avatars until now.
If we keep it at this size, maybe we could ban animated avatars; we'll see.
I like 100.
And as for banning the gif avvvies - Why? We've never had cause to before now. Just because one member 'hates' them - And hasn't stated a reason why?
Or we could compromise on that. Keep the avatars 100/120, but not ban the gifs - Just make them 80x80?
Well, at 100px an animated gif is half again the size that it was, so it's at least that much more notable than it was when everything was tiny. I looked at the Honeycomb while I was considering optimal sizes, and noticed that it has a rule to that effect, so it isn't an idea I came up with just out of thin air. Also, I give Bny's thoughts on how the forum should be great weight and consideration, and if she says she doesn't like something I take it seriously. (That's the main reason why we moved from the ruby red interface bars to the salmon color a while back.)
That said, a smaller size for animated gifs, rather than an all-out ban, doesn't sound unreasonable, and we could certainly start with a 80px limit and see how that feels.
Oh, okay, I can blame BanBan for the pink I despise with a passion now. ;) Thanks for dropping that piece of info.
Quote from: James Gryphon on October 16, 2016, 06:43:50 PM
That said, a smaller size for animated gifs, rather than an all-out ban, doesn't sound unreasonable, and we could certainly start with a 80px limit and see how that feels.
Sounds better than an extreme, all-out ban. ;)
I support smaller sizes for GIFs.
On the salmon: From what I could see of pictures of Redwall, it's hard to get it right (every one varies a little bit), but the color we use here is close, about as close as I think I can get from a simple gradient:
(http://web.archive.org/web/20000511100108im_/http://www.redwall.org/images/introb.jpg)
Now, I had meant to go through and change the light pink bars (like the one surrounding the News ticker) to better match the tiles you see in the picture here, but I never got around to that... maybe I will, sometime.
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I'll talk to Matthias about the 80px limit for animated gifs next time I see him.
The news icker is more purple than pink, and I like it. The rest: Ew.
As for banning gifs...why?
As far as I can tell, nobody is spamming gifs all throughout their signature or whatever the heck. :P
The forum, FeralFront, has a rather large picture size and gifs have never been a problem.
Whether someone doesn't like looking at them or not shouldn't impact whether we should HAVE the ability to be able to use them or not.
Well, we're not talking about banning all animated gifs everywhere, just ones in avatars that are a certain size.
The reason why is, when an animated avatar is larger than a certain size, you can see constant movement out of the corner of your eye, and it's distracting, possibly enough to keep you from fully concentrating on what that person is trying to say.
As far as whether not liking things should impact what we're able to do here... I could go on and on about the things we've turned off or put restrictions on, more or less because we (or even I) didn't like it. ;) Other forums incorporate some or all of the things that we don't, so it isn't that a forum ceases to function when these features are available. That's just not the direction we want this community to go.
It's the same sort of principle as why we have small signature image sizes. We could have bigger ones, but we feel it makes the forum harder to use for the purpose of reading people's words, for no great benefit. So, there's a rule against it.