Uploading an avatar in GWGuru, aka the most difficult thing ever

Erm...

I understand you guys don't want to lose bandwith, but what's the reason of the ascetic choice of allowing only 100x100 avatars which can't be bigger than 19k? Finding a nice avatar that fits in is horribly difficult, I must say I almost gave up.

Even the signatures are de-activated, sheesh...

Anyone is feeling my pain and sympathizes with me?

no if you can't find a nice avatar of 19 k, ur not worthy

thanks for reminding me, i need to put my avatar up

100 x 100 is a typical size of most forums I visit, so I don't understand you're objection there. Some even go smaller -- I know of a forum belonging to a massive online company, with hundreds of thousands of members, that doesn't allow avatars over 60 x 60. Jolt forums don't allow avatars at all. An avatar is just an image that you can be recognised easily by, your visual persona -- literally an 'avatar' then. It's not there to be a work of art, nor a gigantic poster, just an image people can easily recognise and say 'Oh look, that's Jeff!'. You don't need any more space than 100 x 100 to do that. The space we have is actually quite generous.

The file size rule is not just about server space, either. Take it from me, if people start using avatars much larger than that, then forums typically become quite slow (even on a fast connection -- and you have to bear in mind that there are still a few people using 56k, and it wouldn't be fair on them if everyone had multi-megabyte avatars). It's not just your image that will be loaded up with each thread, but every single avatar on that thread, and larger files add up quite quickly. Most forums have this size limitation, and some actually have a lower one. Frankly, if you can't find a 100 x 100 JPEG for under 19k, I'd love to know what it is you're trying to upload.

As for the signatures, I believe I read somewhere that the administration of this website disabled them because they slowed down the forums considerably. Even text-based signatures would have this effect, so they were completely turned off. And I'm personally glad of this -- I get completely sick of forums which allow their members to insert huge banners beneath each post.

At the end of the day, we're here for the posts, not the images and assorted goodies that can be tagged onto them.

I totally agree with the OP!! I spent about 2 hours trying to get this avatar to be less than 20k. I'd blotch small areas, change the resolution, and got within bytes of having the right size. It was really frustrating!

I would be content with 22-25k limit

ur all whiners

think of the poor ppl in africa!

It has less to do with b/w than with users.

10 posters x 19kb = 190 kb to download.

I found taking an avatar that's too big and resizing it and converting to gif will make things fit nicely.

It really isn't hard to downsize avatars. I managed to get an animated one working on here. Just make sure that you export it as a GIF, preferably using Adoby Imageready, where you can edit lossy and # of colors. You can get it to come out looking great and still be under the limit.