I'm thinking about enabling avatars for my message board, due to popular request. Personally, I haven't always been fond of them for various issues, but I figure there's not too much harm in it -- and it's better to give the members what they want to make things enjoyable.

I have a few questions about how OpenTopic handles avatars, though, and I haven't been able to find much documentation on this.

1. Custom avatar URLs. I know that OT lets you set the image dimensions in the control panel, but does this simply constrain the proportions of the image, or does OT actually check the image that's submitted to the profile and reject it if it's not the proper size? The latter would be very handy.
   
2. Can I restrict the use of avatars to members with a certain post count or seniority in some way? This would help avoid abuse by those people who join up and then don't stick around.
   
3. I ran a search for "avatar" in this forum, and saw the handy suggestion of allowing single custom avatars in the member status field. Aside from custom avatars, is this the only way to circumvent the system on that?

Thanks for your help.

Dan Carlson, Administrator, Subspace Comms Network
A Proud Mac User Since 1993!

Custom avatar URLs >>> does this simply constrain the proportions of the image, or does OT actually check the image that's submitted to the profile and reject it if it's not the proper size?

OT constrains the image it doesn't check the size of an image on anoterh server.

Can I restrict the use of avatars to members with a certain post count or seniority in some way?

Not yet. The next major version will allow this.


I ran a search for "avatar" in this forum, and saw the handy suggestion of allowing single custom avatars in the member status field. Aside from custom avatars, is this the only way to circumvent the system on that?

I'm not following your question exactly. You can use the custom emmber title field for images that *you* control as admin. This is handy. Otherwise Avatar setting are on for all, off for all. There are some good user-oriented FAQs at http://community.infopop.net/6/ubb.x?a=frm&s=729094322&f=3700965652

Michael Farris
Infopop Product Evangelist

Ah, I see. Thanks for the tips, and the pointer to the FAQs. I thought the "Just Conversation" section was more of a REAL miscellaneous section, not informative.

Would there be a way to get OT to forcibly constrain the custom URLs submitted for avatars, either by dimensions or at least by image size? Because in the past (on an old EZboard years ago) we had a couple of idiotic individuals who submitted huge 640x480 images as their avatars...

Dan Carlson, Administrator, Subspace Comms Network
A Proud Mac User Since 1993!