avatars for the avatarless

<trip>   jello one thing about the new boards that i do not like is how people without avatars have ugly placeholders​

<trip>   it is distracting and tbh worse than having none at all​

<trip>   please fix this ok​

<Jello>  we can change them but you'll have to make your opinion known in comms to see if others agree with you​

<trip>   oh whoah i did not think that this was actually a thing that was fixable​

<trip>   now i am trying to decide if i actually care that much​

apparently i do.

 

The female placeholder always confuses me - I keep thinking its Spike from Cowboy Bebop.

 

I rather like the placeholders. I also like the Yahoo placeholders but not the Twitter or Facebook ones.

 

There actually has to be some variety of placeholder due to the way the boards are coded, meaning the alternative is basically a big empty square.

 

well i was thinking that maybe the square could be removed entirely if it's empty. like how it was on the old boards.

 

It cannot, again due to the way Xenforo is coded.

 

oh. well hm now that you say this i see that jello said "we can change them [to be different placeholder avatars]" and not "we can change [it so avatars don't show up at all]" which is what i was glossing it as. well, thanks for explaining how it works anyway.

 

I think we should have placeholders that look just like the ones we have now... except every so often, they randomly become something else. Just for like, a moment. So like, say someone's got the usual X-Wing and they load a page and suddenly BAM! there is Queen Jool as your avatar. For like, a moment. Or until you load the next page. Enough time so that you've registered it and assume you've been hacked by the basest of internet fiends.

And if you report it or something the mods will be all "Hey man I dunno. Make sure your settings are correct."

And eventually people with placeholder icons will get so annoyed they'll change their avatars. PROBLEM SOLVED.

 

What if we dislike other people's placeholders? Can we replace those with an image of our choosing?

 

I am not a weird placeholder avatar so will not be voting.

 

Assign avatars by a yearly lottery.
Five users get an avatar.
The rest get shot.

 

coffee this is the best plan.

 

I just have to ask... if the people who haven't uploaded an avatar are happy with the appearance of the default placeholder avatars, does it really matter?

 

Yeah, for evidence of that look at what we had on the temp forums. Unspecified gender had a default avatar of a giant question mark, male had a giant male symbol, and female had a giant female symbol. Really silly looking. Grimby did a great job on the default avatars here for people that just don't want to provide their own custom avatar.

 

And if you want an avatar and are lacking in the art department, we can always resurrect the icon request thread.

 

Or just, you know, google stuff.

 

No, actually, I think this solution makes the most sense.

 

As a former icon artist, I approve of this.

 

Shot in the dark here:

Would there be a way to write a script that finds all placeholder avatars on the page (probably via the image URLs) and applies style="display: none;" as inline CSS to the surrounding "div.avatarHolder"? This would not necessarily need to be in XenForo itself, but perhaps a server-side script that runs after the page is generated or even client-side JavaScript.

Is this feasible? (Probably not, but thought I throw a random dart and see if it sticks.)

 

From a purely technical standpoint, possibly; but from a logistical standpoint I could see it causing issues, particularly in older browsers on older hardware.

And possibly newer browsers, depending on how it was implemented.

 

I think we should convert all avatars to 3D. I mean 2D is so 8bit peeps.