As long as we're asking for more for the avatars, I wouldn't mind animated gif files too.

Photoshop > "Save for Web"

Plenty of us have full-color avatars under 5K.

10K @ 25 posts per page = 250K just for avatars. That's a bit unreasonable.

HEY, GUYS, JAY'S NOT BUDGING ON THIS ONE. LET IT GO. I GUESS THERE ARE STILL PEOPLE OUT THERE ON DIAL-UP WHICH MEANS THAT THE REST OF US HAVE TO SUFFER BECAUSE OF THEM.

I really had to jam down the resolution on mine just to get it to 5k. Just for the record.

NOT EVERYBODY HAS PHOTOSHOP JUST LIKE NOT EVERYBODY IS ON DIAL-UP. ;)

There's a lot of bloat on JPEG images by default. I resized mine in Irfanview, and unchecked a bunch of options (Keep original EXIF data, Keep original IPTC data, Keep original JPEG-comment), and that got my avatar down from 12k to 5k without having to drop the quality any more.

Well done!

Some JPGs compress better than others. My avatar is a "CG Dawn", a simple gradient, and compresses very well. 635 bytes.

Migration complete. Situation normal.

I like the improvements. Thanks Jay!

If you need software for editing/resizing/convert to jpeg, get Gimp. It's free.

I guess I can see that. However, PSYCHODAVE is right, not everyone has Photoshop (even though I do, I was trying to do my avatar from work). My color avatars always seem to come out around 8K.

--SKot

Gimp rocks. Use it if you don't have Photoshop or some other image editor.

While I agree that GIMP is an excellent graphics editor, it's overkill for simply resizing an image and saving to JPG. I used IrfanView, and was able to get my avatar under 5K at 99% quailty.

An even better editor than GIMP is Paint.NET. Works just like Photoshop, except it's free.

This thread reminded me of an old PM exchange with Jay I had a while back:

I used PhotoStudio, although I'm not sure it's free anymore.

test

ok someone else said it first hehe. Is it possible to make the avatar "canvas" the same dark blue as the background? So there's no need for stretching, etc to avoid seeing the light blue background with smaller images. Don't want to sound picky, but if it's an easy fix honestly I think it would look much better than seeing slivers of light blue around people's avatars. Transparent gifs would look really nice too if the canvas were same color as background.
Congratulations on the software btw, nice job! It may be my imagination but site navigation has been feeling "snappier" too.

Well done Jay, although I find it bizarre that you write your own forum software instead of using any of the dozens of highly functional open source forums...

You've given us the option to turn off avatars and signatures. Hurrah! I can turn off everyone's useless joke pictures that take up more space on screen than their one line of text ...

However, when I turn off avatars, it still shows a large space with "generic person" image. The idea of turning off images for me, is not to save download time but to stop wasting screen space...

So could you make it that when avatars are off, the space for the avatar is not displayed?
Thanks.

Because I can't brand and sell them when I'm finished :)

Good reason :)

So how about my request? In general your forum wastes a lot of screen space - the white space looks nice but is so excessive that on some forums the titles and announcements section takes up the whole visible page and the actual discussion topics are off the bottom.

As I said in the first post, please restrict comments/criticisms/suggestions to the appropriate forums. Thanks.

But to answer your question, yes, I can remove the avatars completely if they're switched off. To address your other concern, I don't see how the spacing could get any tighter vertically. If a forum has announcements, they're going to push down the rest of the content. That's just the way it is. Compressing everything so it all runs together results in poor readability and difficulty in navigating page contents. I don't consider the whitespace a waste at all.

If whitespace were a waste, all web sites, magazines, and newspapers would look like a page from a dictionary.

Closing this topic down now since most new posts will probably be more appropriately placed within the comments section.