My Hobbes avatar has disappeared, and it looks like a lot of members' have changed to blue dots. It seems that what is left are peoples' custom avatars?

Going to the account page and looking for avatars shows more than 20 pages, but the same few avatars show up on each page.

Technical problems, or more issues with copyright?

 

Hi,

Thank you for letting us know, I will let the techs know.

Bob

 

Hi,

Your avatar is the 'tiger'. You can change it from your User Control Panel linked below. The blue/red bullets indicated on or off line.

Bob

https://g35driver.com/forums/profile.php?do=editavatar

 

Yes, that's the page I was looking at. If you cycle through the 20 pages of choices, you will see that they are all scrambled and many many duplicates. And the avatar I was using, just the head of Hobbes (the tiger from Calvin and Hobbes) is not among the choices. Nor is there a choice of "tiger." So I still think something is up.

I did recently update my operating system from MacOS 10.11.x to current MacOS 10.13.x, but I don't see why that would have made any difference with this issue.

 

I did a little poking around and tried downloading the broken link file. Here's the error message I'm getting:

"The file “hobbes.gif” could not be opened.

"It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize."

Are the avatar images stored on the local machine or are they served to the pages by the forum?

Sounds like it could be a local issue for me, since it seemed to happen when I updated.

I just tried opening it in Photoshop, and it opened fine. I'm going to save it from Photoshop and see if I can upload it as a custom avatar....

 

I see now you have to be a premier member to have a custom avatar. It seems I am doomed to not see my own avatar, even though it is supposed to be a standard avatar. I was able to open the Photoshop-saved .gif file just fine using the Apple "Preview" built-in software.

 

Perhaps it is time we re-think the Avatar restriction for registered members. I'll followup here if there are any changes. Thank you.

Bob

 

You have a couple of comments on this in the Moderator/Admin section.

 

Well the clouds have parted, the angels sang and the gods have spoken! Any registered member can now upload a custom avatar and a profile picture!! The mods had a brief discussion with the powers that be and they decided it was a great idea to make the change.

Thank you IB and Bob for making the forum better!!

 

Many appreciations everyone. This is an unexpected solution to my issue, and far better than I could have hoped for!

 

I'm grateful for IB stepping up, listening to the concerns of our members and making a desired change. Thank you!!