Current Avatars will remain unchanged at first, but the moderation will start removing some especially large ones.

When uploading an Avatar make sure to compress it as much as possible, tools like pngcrush might help.

Isn't 6kb a little too few?

I remember I had to compress the shit out of my floyd avatar to make it fit in 15Kb. And I don't consider 15kb huge. Specially given it'll be at people's cache after they read one message by that poster...

We are not planning on removing existing, popular, non-distracting avatars (even if they are animated ). It has just gotten a bit out of hand lately and this is a try to keep Avatars civilized (size-wise).
The policy is also still being discussed and subject to change, so any criticism is welcome.

The size does seem a bit limited....and no external linking? Why?

The idea was that anything 110x110 non animated should be compressible to < 6kb looking decent. Bigger size = waste of bandwith and time for modem users.


It's easier to controll the size limit automatically that way.

Hmm, I see, but external linking has one major advantage. Users wishing to change their avatar on all forums they visit can do so by uploading the new one just one time, assuming they're using an external link.

If you have an externally linked avatar right now that doesn't exceed the 6kb size limit, it won't be removed, so I think you can still change it that way (replacing the picture on your server by another one with the same name).

*sighs* As someone whose avatar conflicts with the new rule, I think there are other ways around it. There's an option to turn them off, right? If we turned them off for guest users as well, then there'd be no problem for modem users.

Most decent browsers load the page and then the avatars anyhow, so I'm not sure where the problem lies. They get cached, and so on. I mean, it's 15kB. If every single person has the max-sized avatar, at the standard (25? I use 40.) page length, that's a maximum of 375kB, which isn't much over a 56k modem.

Edit: Alternately, I could probably do something to replace my current avatar in under 6kB as an SWF, but that doesn't seem to be an option either.

Hmm,

from 15kb to 6kb doesnt seem to be a big step, but it can speed up site loading if your 56k modem or ISDN connection is busy downloading another site or some other data.

And besides that, a way for new users to bypass this new limitation is to use jpeg avatars for still images. So they can still have 110x110 sized avatars with lots of detail and colors.

My Avatar for example is around 6kb, but since it's a png file it could be shrinked even to less (1~2kb) using jpeg. Another idea would be to automatically convert uploaded avatars to jpeg, but personally I don't like that idea, because it's still my own choice how I want to present my avatar to the public. Also metadata stored in some image formats is very likely to get erased.

Another thing: You say that old users can keep their >6kb images, but what if for some reason a user decides to changes his avatar, but doesn't like the new one and want the old one back? Will that still be possible?

For the poor fellows that are on dial up and want to speed up browsing HA:



Simple as that. No need for avatar size limiting, blocking avatars from off-site and whatnot.

agreed, 56K users can turn off avatars. Maybe we could set them off by default for guest users?

If bandwidth is the problem, off-site linking should be ENCOURAGED.

I've found these programs for reducing the size of PNG images to be better than PNGCrush.

advpng from the AdvanceCOMP part of AdvanceMAME.
http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/comp-download.html

PNGOUT from Ken Silverman
http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm

How about reducing maximum avatar dimensions down? 110x110 is actually pretty large, something like 75x75 would reduce image sizes almost in half by itself. My own forums allow 75x75 6KB max images for avatars, mainly for bandwidth reasons on the server end.

I've also noticed that the avatar uploading changes the file size. My avatar should be 3.28KB but shows up here as 6.66KB. I also noticed that it tries to resize my avatar if I don't specify the actual dimensions of the picture I am uploading.

I'd say 77x77, filesize 7KB.

I am on 56k dialup here, and I've never found anyone's avatar slowing down my browsing enough to complain.

Please reconsider.

Cheers,
CD

Edit: Removed the filesize limit as I'm happier with no restrictions there. Never came across an avatar that was disruptively huge on this board, even the ones above 20 kB.

Same here.
I am currently depending on a particularly crappy mexican ISP's dial-up service and I have absolutely no complaints, whatsoever

So, if me and others like me are the reason for this change, I politely refuse to accept such a "favor".

Thanks.

56K for me too, since this summer, and I'm not annoyed by avatars (there are in browser cache, I suppose).

Nice to see that PNG is FINALLY accepted on some sites.

jsut wonder when IE will get support of animated .PNG (I forgot the real extension) and JPEG2000

MNG

Same here. 7KB is what I've seen on most other boards.

IE doesn't even properly support PNG yet! :B

You won't get any hardware compression to speak of like you do with text so if you get a perfect connection, 56kbits/sec = 7kbytes/second. 375 kbytes would take about a minute.
Thats a lot extra to wait for a web page.

To start with, 375kB is an exaggeration. Not everyone uses avatar. And often the same person posts more than once at a thread, and his avatar is loaded only once.

Also, if you're an hydrogenaudio regular (I mean, visits the site about once a week at least), chances are that you already have most avatars at your cache.

Last but not least, people that are annoyed with the avatar loading time are free to disable them with the control panel.

i would still love if people would know wen to go jpeg and when to go PNG:

Look at DonP's avatars
Its clearly better to use png on that one but is jpeg..bloating filesize and decreasing quality

af .png from the clean source would fill less and have no jpeg artifacts


---edit---
.png of the avatar from unclean source but reduced to 256 colors (not noticable difference) is below 4kbyts

Hmmm, saving my particular .gif (13kb in disc space) avatar to a .png (presumably uncompressed) in photoshop7 nets no reduction in size on the disc, but perhaps this is idiosyncratic to photoshop.

Saving the original (19.2kb on disc, high quality) JPEG to a .png file in photoshop increases the file size on disc to 28.2kb.

If part of the reason for the new rule has to do with reducing costs of hosting, I understand completely and I will remove my avatar altogether.

If this is a courtesy to modem users, I concur with rjamorim - the option to disable avatars is there.

I just have to say that 6kb seems way to small as well. My avatar is ~8kb PNG, I can make it around 6kb with JPG, but it looks like complete crap. I think a more reasonable size (15-20kb) should be enforced. Obnoxious avatars are a totally different story and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

totally agree ... 6kb is way too small ... and if it is to reduce bandwith cost, why don't enforce to use esternal linking? i mean pointing to external srcs, so no bandwith is consumed from ha ... well ... mine is 3.02 kb, so i'm not telling cause me being afected

I'm pretty sure it's idiosyncratic to Photoshop, although I could be wrong. Some versions of Photoshop have been known to produce sub-optimal PNGs.

There are many cases, though, where GIF and PNG compression are approximately equivalent. It's lossless, not lossy, so there ya go.

The jpeg format is meant for pictures, like photos or things with lots of gradients. It is blurry and quick to lose detail, since, well, it is a lossy format.

The gif format is lossless (uses lzw compression) but its restricted to 256 colors (from Compuserve BBS days...) one of the colors can be used for "transparency"...

The Portable Network Graphics is "A Turbo-Studly Image Format with Lossless Compression". Not only is lossless, it also accepts a full alpha channel which is great for blending against any type of background (of course Internet Explorer fails to do this blending...). Unlike gif, there is no "animation" in png. For that, the Multiple-image Network Graphics format was born, but its still not so widely supported, yet...

Consider that png accepts indexed (anything less than 24 bit with supplied palette), grayscale, grayscale with alpha, 24bit, 24 bit with alpha and 48 bit with alpha. If you are careless, your program may be saving the image in 48 bits! (16 bit per channel, whoa!)

PNG uses a Deflate compression, an LZ77 derivative used in zip, gzip, pkzip, and related programs. It is more efficient with patterns of the same colors repeating, so a cartoon will compress much better than a photo with gradients, etc. So you can imagine that reducing the number of colors can help compression.

PNG is also a w3c recommendation.

My avatar is only around 2 kb

I'm conforming now...

bye bye to alpha channel... hello little blocks and blurry shades.



The biggest irony is that it looks better in IE now... bloody microsoft.

Not a big change, but you can losslessy reduce the size of yours with pngcrush.

how about 'no animated avatars' ? (roberto is exception of course)

(they are annoying - distractive (is that a word?))

Has anyone actually complained about the size of avatars? If they have I would say to them that their time on this planet is very short, and there is much they have yet to achieve. Not only that, but in the time it took to complain, many avatars would have loaded.

Other than that, I vote no change in policy, other than a clean out of offensive avatar's (of which I dont recall seeing any).

...and legally questionable ones?

I also think that 6kb is too small for the avatars (mine's 12kb, even after optimization! ).
I'm on a 56k dial-up modem also, and have no slow page loadings etc. But maybe it's just because I'm used to wait a while before pages load up..
I'd vote for ~15kb limit

Damn makes me think I was to blame for this action... since I was having a few issues with my avatars.

My stance is nothing on this site offends me or is slow to load up on my 56k modem. I would of though offsite linking would be encouraged to stop avatars chewing up server bandwidth. So I my position is to leave the avatar policy unchanged.

Regards

AgentMil

Your avatar was 24bit which is way too much.
Attached modification is 256 colors and optimized.
Only 4,65KB.

Reduced mine from 18.1 KB to 5.6 KB (still png, but 32 colors now). External hosting.

agree big area of same colors are a no go for jpeg, but its loved by .PNG

BTW reducing to 256 colors and using PNGout, your avatars fill 3.73 with NO noticable difference.

the reasong you avats is "big" compared to the simplexity is because of anti aliasing.

few colors in big areas = .PNG wil do MUCH better then jpeg
lots of single colors in small pixels and lots of shades = jpeg rules


--- EDIT ---

"Benchmarks" of .PNG compression show that PHotshop are doing af SHITTY job at compressing. tru using PaintShop Pro/irfanview/ACDSee instead and consider using PNGout for extra compression


does anybody now if IE supports MNG and wher to find an animated gif to MGN conveter


---- EDIT---


Just to show how bad Photshop is for compression.
PaintSgop Pro did the fiel in only 11.4 Kbytes.
PNG out made it further shrink to 11.2.

hehe maybe i should make a Avatars Compression Service for people... :-)

It's not to bug you but if you run advpng on that file you can get the size down to 3,88KB.

You're not bugging me
Thanks for the tool.

hehe i got it down to 3.86 with PNGout
Also testet with audiable avatar... PNGout give better compressiong the advcomp.


Benchmarks around PNGout vs PNG crush show that PNGout gives best compression in most cases

hoh did you reduce coloers and keep transparancy seem liek PSP dump transparacy when doing color reduction.

But i got it down to 3.66kb at 256 colors no transparacy.

-- edit--
i now se that you didnt keep the tranpracy and i must say that my conversion keepes the fadeout much better then yours...

how do i attach files ?

Use the save for web function in PSP and remember to check the transparancy box.

Your version does not have transparancy/alpha channels
when i open in PSP the checkerboard (transparancy) background is gone...

Anyway i did a rehash of the avatars WITH comple alpha channels but made the milde in only 256 colors. the size was then 7.24kbyts i can get i down more but it requires manually work

And besdies... If the avatars is only going to be on this site (alway same bacground color) tranparacy is not needed in the final output, so my prev 3.78kbytes version should be considered the better choice in compresion & quality

You become a moderator or use the upload forum.


Hmm... I only checked with PSP if it was tranparent and saw the tranparency grid... but yes. something is very wrong with my version of anza's avatar.

Damn.... I had to take my color depth down to 128-bits, and then png-out the result in order to get it to fit.

But you'll be unlikely to see the difference from the previous ones, so I guess it's good overall. I should be HA-compliant now.

I use a 56k modem (which connect at a lot less) sometimes. There is no problem with HA for me.

If this is the only reason for the low limit, then it's probably not needed (IME). Of course, if there are other reasons, that's OK - and it's always good to make people think about reducing the file size of things flying around the internet.

Cheers,
David.

i got it down to 2.84kbytes by only using 16 colors

There is a noticable difference when flipping betwens 128 colors and the 16 colors version
However i think its not noticable if you dont have the "reference" avatar...

the reasong you need to reduce coleros is because of the antialiasing on this avatarts
its really destroys redundancy and bit patterns