Forum - View topicAvatars - Yes I read the locked sticky and its sister thread
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daxomni
 Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
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Please add me to the list of people who disagree with this thoroughly outdated position. Restricting avatars to 80x80 within 6KB is just a bit too limiting for off-site images and it doesn't reflect the current reality of today. I don't know anyone who is still on dialup anymore, including relatives from the WWII generation who are not technically minded in the least. They either have broadband at home or they simply access the internet at work, school, or the library over more modern lines. I'm not even a big pro-avatar kind of a guy myself, but demanding 80x80 in 6KB or less in an era when even little 15" notebooks run at a native resolution of 1400x1050 and broadband penetration is approaching 70% among active North American users is just plain silly. Modern browsers can easily block images from off-site servers with just a couple clicks of your mouse. Most recent computer games and even the ubiquitous console systems are now designed to take advantage of broadband connections at the exclusion of dial-up users these days. Back when I was downloading at a handful of Kb/s on a blurry 15" CRT (13.5" viewable) set at a fuzzy and flickering 800x600 I probably would have agreed with you, but that was over a decade ago for Pete's sake! Let's get with the times already. This is almost as silly as restricting our discussions of anime DVD's just because a minority of users still only have VHS players. 100x100 at 50KB for off-site images seems a lot more reasonable to me. I fully support a ban on moving images though, especially when they're on continuous repeat and running at attention whore speed. Those things are hideous, annoying, and anything but aesthetically pleasing. 
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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A new colleague of ours who just returned from US last month had been a prisoner of AOL Jail for the past seven years, dial-up for $29.95 per month. She tried to switch to EarthLink but for some unknown reason she simply couldn't get online via EarthLink (and even their tech support couldn't find out why; I'd say she didn't uninstall AOL completely or somehow messed up the terminal settings), so she was forced to return to AOL. There are many more American users imprisoned in the notorious AOL Jail than you'd know; ever heard of Vincent Ferrari? Just for the record: I paid my 3M/256K cable modem together with my roommate at $42.95 per month three years ago. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10455 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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The 80x80 limit will remain. Research shows that most (around 70%) browse at 1024x780, while a further 17% are still running 800x600. (FYI, I run 1600x1200) As for filesize, I may consider relaxing the limit somewhat, however 10kb is likely, 50kb is not. If our advertisers are able to keep their 728x90 and 300x250 advertisements under 45kb, there's certainly no reason to allow 50kb for an avatar (ANN also keeps its review thumbnails (100x140) under 10kb). Bear in mind, that, according to your data, 30% of people are still on dial-up. Since images are already compressed, 56k and 33.6k modems will operate at the same speed (56k are 28.8k/33.6k modems with a special compression algorithm) when downloading avatars, 33.6k. A page with twenty 50kb avatars would contain 1 meg of avatars. That's four-minutes of downloading avatars on a 33.6k modem. Additionally, 33.6/56k users aside, larger avatars contribute to bandwidth creep, which isn't good for anyone. Ever notice that your cable modem rarely achieves the bandwidth that it's capable of? (Unless you're using a provider that caps user bandwidth to some cruddy speed like 1.2mbs). -t |
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Gage
Posts: 480 Location: United States |
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I know I don't use an avatar but judging from others that I've seen, I really don't see the big deal about keeping them the same. The size and such look just fine that's of course my opinion.
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woelfie
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 380 Location: Belgium |
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I don't want to offense you, but North America just isn't the center of the universe. Even though ANN is aimed mostly at American users, there's a big part of the world which hasn't reached broadband internet yet, but which might be interested in this very same website. A friend of mine (33 years old) just bought his first computer... for his work. It's been no intellectual miss, but until now, he just didn't need it. I admit that 6K isn't very much, but I don't see any use in big avatars. After all, they only serve to have people identify you easier. I've been in the ANN forums long enough to decide whether or not it's a waste of time to read the post, just by looking at the picture on the left (and vice versa, some user's posts are always worth reading...like mine  ).
of course you have those slicky people who change their avatar every few days And for your information : I work at 1280x1024; I got a 10M/192K cable connection which costs me €41.95 per month. Not everyone wants to pay that. P.S. dormcat, It's been a while since I laughed as much as with the Ferrari phonecall - so embarassing |
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daxomni
Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
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There's no serious reason to read this rebuttal, but here it is anyway, just for the record.
I used to work as a PC repair guy in a former life, and I can tell you from first hand experience that AOL isn't called a virus for nothing. Their clients get in and disrupt just about everything using nearly every trick in the book. It's a major mess to get rid of it and I don't blame anyone who fails on their first try. Heck, it took a couple tries for me to get the hang of killing it myself.
I'm sure you really meant 1024x768? As for me, I run at 1600x1050 on my little widescreen. The logos are still visible and their size doesn't bother me nearly as much as their compression artifacts.
My own logo could have fit within 10KB without too much compression, so I'd probably be happy with that. Maybe 15KB just to be on the safe side?
That's certainly true but, as I said, another option for such users is to block these images with their own browser settings. If only off-site images were allowed to exceed the low file size limit then it's an easy matter to exclude them with each dial-up user's browser settings. I'd even write up a how-to post so that every dial-up user could follow along.
Actually, 56K modems simply made use of a known technical loophole whereby a single digital-to-analog conversion step between your ISP and your modem could be forced to allow more raw downstream data to be pushed through if it were treated more like a digital line on the ISP's side. If it were merely a compression issue then the extra speed would have probably worked in both directions but because it required the known properties of D-A conversion to function properly it only works in one direction (the other direction, using A-D conversion, provides no such loophole). The more recent special compression systems you're probably talking about became common well after 56K modems were already standardized and it's quite true that they don't work on files that are already compressed.
That's true only if we assume they were all brand-new avatars (or the cache had recently been cleared) and no two avatars were the same. Also, a 56K modem operating at 50Kbps will download everything at 50Kbps, including compressed avatar images. It would probably still be rather painful for someone on a line that slow but I just happen to be a stickler for small details like that.
My provider caps my downstream speed at around 3Mbps and I can almost always hit that speed if I'm connected to a fast server on the other end. It's the upstream speed of 384Kbps that doesn't impress me much. My employer's client has an OC-3 line that used to really scream and routinely allowed multiple downloads in the 10Mbps range each, but it's gotten so slow now that it's actually worse than what I can get at my house. Apparently they turned on some massive firewall system that is slowing everything way down. I can bypass the proxy servers with my access rights, but I can't bypass the firewall because of how it's integrated into the network. Oh well, such is life.
I kind of felt the same way until I tried to upload one myself. Then I was suddenly both shocked and annoyed. I had always assumed the compression artifacts were merely the result of ignorance, but then I realized at least some of them were probably due to the overly restrictive size constraints.
This website isn't actually hosted by Americans or for Americans. Anime just seems to be more popular in America than most other English-speaking countries so we happen to get a lot of Americans on here. |
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doc-watson42
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1709 |
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At the least, could this spelling error be fixed? ^_^; |
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Godaistudios
Posts: 2075 Location: Albuquerque, NM (the land of entrapment) |
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Just a small comment from me on this... Even though I'm about to be laid off from AOL (as of Dec. 16) after nearly 10 years, it's hardly the "prison" that it used to be, say five years ago. Back then, there were many people in the "saves" department who would game the system in order to recieve higher bonuses. Ferrari's call was actually quite out of the ordinary, and I still don't like the man for a variety of reasons. He baited the rep during the call, and he fell under the "customer is always right, even when you know they are wrong" scenario, but he was made to look like this great hero/patron saint of customer service. I analyzed the call numerous times, and the flaws on his end were swept under the media by playing up a bigger story. When the problems he created during the call have been pointed out, he's acted quite arrogantly about them (I've read his blog and seen the posts.) I'm not saying change wasn't needed, but this call was blown way out of proportion If you wish to discuss that further, by all means, PM me. As far as the software goes? Yeah, it has it's share of problems, but it's not so nearly as buggy as Windows half the time. I started in tech support with the company, and I can tell you that there are older versions of AOL which were much worse when they came out. 5.0 and 6.0 were huge culprits. It's been relatively stable over the last couple of years, and not so nearly impossible to deal with. If she couldn't dial in with Earthlink, it wouldn't have had a thing to do with AOL software. They have their own proprietary protocols for dial-up. It's not like aol installs drivers for the modem. It's just got better modem strings for connecting. As a friend of mine once put it, if you could make a toaster connect to the internet, AOL could use it. This hardly makes AOL the best dial up out there, but you could do worse. /end off topic rant Getting to the avatar issues, I do have to wonder. I figure with HD monitors and whatnot on the rise, I suspect that 800X600 will eventually die out. At what time will it be appropriate to increase the 80x80 limit? Just curiosity on my part of course, I have no intention of trying to convince that change is needed for the moment. I do like the notion that the filesize could go up though. It would open up a few other options. Last edited by Godaistudios on Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:16 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10455 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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You're right, my bad. I was mixing up V.90 and a completely unrelated compression standard.
3MBs pretty cruddy IMHO 
Uncapped, most cable modems are capable of 7MBs or so. It's pretty rare for those of us with uncapped cable modems to get full speed file transfers from anyone except the ISP itself. -t |
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PantsGoblin
 SubscriberEncyclopedia Editor  Posts: 2969 Location: L.A. |
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That would be awesome. Whenever I resize images, they are always are just slightly above the 6kb limit (usually, around 6.2 or something...). I always have to change it to .jpg, which lowers the quality... So I would love it even if it were raised to just 7kb. Personally, I would be up for the 100x100 50kb file size also... Never had a problem with loading them on sites with even larger limits than that... But my computer is pretty fast... |
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TestamentSaki
 Posts: 1012 |
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I totally agree with woelfie. You people have to remember there's people here from many places around the world, and there are lots of countries where dial-up is still big (Colombia's slowly evolving to broadband, but it's still quite expensive)
I agree that 100 x 100 pixels and 50 Kb is an exaggeration (sp?), but at least I think that it could be about 86 x 86 and about 10 Kb is a pretty good answer. |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10455 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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It's not a spelling mistake, it's a variant. Like Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia. I wanted to use the latter for ANN, but Dan chose the former. Since then I've been using the "Americanized" (as opposed to "Americanised") spelling of various words as a standard on ANN. Medieval/mediaeval, anemia/anaemia, pediatric/paediatric, etc... And then there's or/our (colour, neighbour, favour, etc...) -t |
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unhealthyman
 Posts: 306 |
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Well, a low file size (6kb-10kb) also restricts use of animated .gifs, which in my opinion is not necessarily a bad thing, seeing as they can be annoying. (Although I find them fun on other forums I use, they just don't seem to suit ANN.)
That said, it always seems a lot easier to make a picture which still looks good at around 90x90 rather than 80x80 which is a bit restrictive. However, I'm not all too bothered at the end of the day. 
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Cow-Boy_Be-Bop
 Posts: 670 Location: In front of the computer |
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There are few out there, but am a user of dial-up and inour house we only have on DVD player, and its not on my room. The rest are VHS. So the minority is still out there don't leave us to the dark side. |
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Dante80
 Posts: 218 Location: Athens Greece |
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I think the best solution would be to go to 100X100X10kb...
I really dont care much about the file size (all pictures can go down to 6kb and still look good)...but the current dimensions are just too small for many of us. Such a change you be beneficial to many users browsing with >1024X768, and at the same time still fair enough for dial-up members. Please reconsider... Salutations from sunny Greece, George F. 
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