GIF Avatars

* bad animated avatars and signatures are the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet.

(see: MySpace and other historical examples. GeoCities comes to mind)

But all animated avatars/signatures are awful.

If I'm trying to read a post, I don't want a stupid face flashing different colours beside it. It's very distracting.

Well the thing is, any image is distracting if you let it be. The same argument can conceptually apply to colours, bold, italic and static images.

I agree that by their nature they're more distracting, but to what extent is dependent on the reader. Does the enjoyment of the unique animation cancel out the extra distraction? Can they be tuned out? Are they arguably decent art, or are they annoying for the sake of it (see: flashing inverted image that does nothing but flip between normal and an inverse colour palette).

Another one I found was this, which is really neat:



EDIT: is there any way to show the avatar at it's default size? I really quite like this one, but it's far better at it's normal resolution.

You can give a transparent background in the larger resolution

That's an amazing avatar.

There's nothing distracting about a spinning thing that literally cannot be comprehended by humans.

So much this. If this is going to be allowed, please give us the option to disable avatars in the settings, just like with those useless signatures.

LOOK AT IT! STARE INTO IT'S DEPTHS!

I enabled animated gifs a few days after the new forum went live. Officially XenForo doesn't support it, so I "hacked" it in. I could probably make an option in your profile for it. I also still have to upgrade the forum... TIME, Y DONT I HAVE ANY.

It's all working now. <----See?
Weeeeeeeeee.