Suggestion Improve avatar support

[Nemesis]

For about the last 20 years I've been using the same avatar just about everywhere, specifically this:

It's a 3.62KB gif (hand-crafted and optimized from back in the day when a lot of forums set a 4KB limit), and I'd like to use it here too. Unfortunately, Xenforo out of the box seems to not like gif images. I notice here currently, it also seems to be forcing all avatars to fit within some kind of circle. Is it possible to tweak a few things here to allow avatars to be a bit more relaxed?

 

[1]

Will sort the gif thing tomorrow, know the issue should be a php tweak. The circle is sadly part of this whole "modern" shit google's pushing out even the base theme here has it by default but will see if I can edit it for you.

 

[Nemesis]

Great, thanks!

 

[Bad_Ad84]

Also agree. Ditch the circle.

 

[1]

Well it's enabled, but XenForo's lame resizing has messed it up so will manually edit the large version.

 

[Druid II]

There seems to be more bugs here regarding image support, the board also seems to serve a lot of resized images with .jpg extension, even if the file is a png. So you get a png named as a .jpg, or in the OPs case, a gif served with .jpg extension, and some browsers can't deal with that.

 

[Dax]

Admittedly I'm not too much of a fan of the circular avatars either. A lot of sites seem to be making the change to them lately towards the more "modern" feel of things as previously mentioned. Will be good to get square ones back and have the option for circular .png/.gif files with transparency etc.!

 

[1]

There seems to be more bugs here regarding image support, the board also seems to serve a lot of resized images with .jpg extension, even if the file is a png. So you get a png named as a .jpg, or in the OPs case, a gif served with .jpg extension, and some browsers can't deal with that.

Yeah XenForo is a weird one, it renames gifs to jpg etc, even though the underlying image is a gif or png for example. It also makes three sizes of the same image, like here on posts it's using the medium size. Not sure why but the php image converter breaks some gifs which I've oddly not seen happen before on other boards.

 

[Nemesis]

The gif was appearing correctly next to my posts, but was broken with bits missing between frames on the smaller versions shown on thread listings. I tried re-encoding it and broke it everywhere, so I've removed it again for now.

 

[Druid II]

I also vote for removing the dumb circle, and maybe the white background too. I'm also more partial to left alignment on both the avatar and text than a centered one. Those should be simple CSS fixes, unlike the image resizer which is a more complex thing (I had so much trouble writing a good resizer in the past, I know how painful that is).

It would also be nice if we could change the text editor from this horrible MCE editor to a plain textbox.

There's generally too much javascript on the place for my liking (I understand that this won't get changed just because of me complaining, but it is what it is: disgusting).

 

[Druid II]

It would also be nice if we could change the text editor from this horrible MCE editor to a plain textbox.

Sorry to bump this, but I just noticed: there's a little gear icon in the editor, which you can use to switch to a plain text editor.

 

[cta]

There's generally too much javascript on the place for my liking (I understand that this won't get changed just because of me complaining, but it is what it is: disgusting).

+1

Most things work fine without it though; some degrade a bit, like the "reply" box I'm typing in rn being tiny (but still usable). The only thing I found not working at all is the YT embeds. I can live with that. Maybe try disabling JS for this domain and see how you like it?

edit: Oops. While YT vids become simple functionless thumbnails, I only just noticed that spoilers don't show up in any way. That's a major issue imho because you don't even know you're missing part of the conversation.