I made this one, then optimized it heavily and it was still too big (it was less than 40k optimised)

The daz forums have avatars that are over 80k (I checked).

it's very nice - weighs in at 132 kB on my machine. I think they must have debated this amongst themselves before setting the size at 25 kB. there were likely some who wanted to avoid inconveniencing dial-up users (who may comprise a substantial share here), whilst others may have felt that they could safely ignore the limitations imposed by dial-up service, given that we have an option to disable avatars in our browsers. hence the current limit of 25 kB may be a compromise they felt was reasonable. personally I'd like to see it higher, but it's an interesting challenge to see if I can fit 'em into 25 kB.

The DAZ forum avatars are only that big if linked to off site. If hosted at DAZ they are a lot smaller.

Animated avatars are irritating. Let's keep the file size small!

I think 25K for an image the size of an avatar is more than adequate.

You have to keep in mind that all of these little images can add up to one big headache for people on slower connections, and you have to admit tha Renderosity doesn't have a history of being a speedy site anyway.

If the avatars irritate you then you can switch them off in your options and it is the same for people with slower connections.

Ok, let's try this....

Where does the size end?  Today it's 25K.  Let's say they do increase it to say 40K....some will come along and beg for a larger file size.  You want 80K...maybe someone will find that too "limiting" and want it larger still.

So where does it end?

most avatars don't irritate me at all, they add a little bit of extra personality to people's posts. however, i can do just fine without them singing, flashing, dancing, making julienne fries, and taking up more space than they do now. the forums should be faster than they are; large moving avatars hinder that, and i will speak out against any suggestions that slow the site down further. btw, you should make suggestions such as this in the community center, as the sticky at the top of the forum directs.

The size could be made 50k for example and then have no more size increases, it wouldn`t have to keep going up.

I posted this here to see if anyone else liked or disliked the idea before posting it to the community forum.

I agree with Acadia and Pleonastic.  25k is enough.  Rosity is slow as molasses anyway.  The last thing we need is humongous animated avatars. 

I, too, like to see people's avatars, but find animated ones annoying.  I usually block them with Firefox. 

Maybe just add an option for off site avatars, like Daz does?

Dialup users should be turning them off anyway, and hi speed racers like me WANT to see lots of little animations, well, because we can!

Heck, I have a animated gif wallpaper on my cellphone larger then 25k! LOL!

xantor, your optimised animation measures about 72 kB on my machine.

The optimized one when i download it, shows at 40.0 KB when I select "Properties".

That is my point, even when optimised it is over the 25k limit and the optimised one obviously has less colours it also has less frames.

Gareees idea about letting people have off site avatars sounds like it would be a good compromise.

Hey cool I didn't know you could turn off the avatars lol Won't.........but nice to know though!

Animated avatars CAN be irritating, I agree on that. Some animations just flicker and blink and is ... well... irritating. Others, like xantor's (and I like to think, my own) are still animated but not annoyingly so.

I just wish for a 40Kb limit. That's what LiveJournal uses and that site is both huge AND fast. I agree that it's hard to make a proper animation at 25kb. 40 or 50 would be much much better.

... hummm .... just by reading this thread i realized how much i dislike avatars even in a broadband connection .... LOL ! I'm heading to the users forum options for the first time to see if i can disable them and customize a few things to my personal liking ... can that be done ? dunno I'll try anyway warpo

woooohoooooOOOooooOOo!!!! coooOOool ! no more annoying bandwidth wasting avatars! just the meat and info Yay! I agree they give a nice personal touch to a post but its cool to have the option to block them... sometimes less is more warpo

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2643851