I think the first option should take care of things - the question is whether it's too big a burden on the technophobes incapable of downloading, then resizing, then uploading a pic.

I've always got avatars turned off anyway, so it doesn't make any difference to me. Ban 'em entirely for all I care.

I vote C

If you vote B or C, please justify your answer. If we go with A, I'm willing to adjust the KB restrictions as necessary to allow for animations to the extent that they don't put too great a strain on our server and defeat the purpose.

A.

Because resizing and cropping is fucking easy.

What about people with pictures in their signatures? Are those slowing anything down or is that entirely different?

That can cause the same issues. I always have those off because I think they're annoying as hell. Also, there is no built in mechanism for allowing people to upload those, so I can't make the same change for those.

ditto

ban pic's in sigs.

in your profile you can turn off pics without turning off text, so i see no need to ban them.

I went with B for the reasons you stated: not everyone can figure those things out.

oh cool. didn't know that.

i could be wrong, but i think all threads with Northern Soul run really slow.

Once you do it once, its easy-peasy.

Irfanview is a free program you can download, and you don't even have to play with numbers of pixels when you're resizing. You can just half the size of the image until its small enough.

And up-loading just means a right mouse click and then "save as" in your pictures file or on your desktop, if that's easier to find.

Learning new shit is good!

ive been noticing that on some threads ive posted on lately that ill get the avatar not found message, and then other times it will appear without any trouble. ive turned it off, so we'll see if it helps. oh, and i would have to go with c, because not only can you turn them all off, if there are some youre not liking you can block them in firefox with the adblock extension.

I've never noticed any slow avatars

yes, the threads you posted in are much faster now.
thanks.

blast! now i need to go and find me another one.

or save it differently.

I like avatars, but I like them simple. Save the animations, etc. for sigs which anyone can turn off at will without missing out on the avatars.

I voted A.

There is a size limit if it's uploaded to obner, right?

(I figure the problem with the avatar being an externally referenced file, is the bandwidth/ speed of the hosting site, not really the size of the image.)