hewiak Wed 24 Oct 2012 10:20PM
Folks put a lot of their personality into their avatars–the good, the bad and the ugly–and it certainly expresses the 'freedom' side of D*, but having both user level options: 'turn off .gif avatars', 'turn off all .gif' would be great.
Jason Robinson Thu 25 Oct 2012 6:17AM
+1 for support for gifs and +1 for choice for not having them - then we fill freedom AND usability
sometwo Sat 9 Mar 2013 6:07PM
I would also suggest H264 as a possible format. It is much smaller than .gif and provides much higher quality.
Sean Tilley Sun 10 Mar 2013 6:53PM
Well, I'm not sure that h264 is the best candidate. It is not an open format, and I'm not sure we'd want to have small videos for user avatars.
Shmerl Mon 11 Mar 2013 3:44PM
Dependency on H.264 is definitely not suitable, since it's a proprietary codec. In general, animation is resource hungry, and supporting it in avatars can be taxing, especially in the mobile view.
sometwo Mon 11 Mar 2013 10:45PM
How about a file size limit?
Allow as most extensions as possible, but limit them all by a maximum file size.
Rasmus Fuhse Tue 12 Mar 2013 4:21PM
Okay half a year ago I didn't have any opinion in this or was just undecided. Now my point is (if this is still an active discussion): listen to the users. They want to have GIFs, because they want to have some kind of multimedia going on. Static content is so much 80's.
Don't get me wrong. I know that a lot of sites look creepy if they support animated GIFs like myspace. But to simply say no to an obvious user-wish (looking at tumblr, which is quite successful) is too easy. We need to find ways of displaying GIFs or other animated content nicely to the user. Probably we should make the GIF static at first and let it animate when the user hovers the mouse over it or touches it on the user's touch-device. Probably we also need some option to disable animated media entirely for the users, too. But please don't ignore the users and their most used features.
goob Tue 12 Mar 2013 4:48PM
I think it's more accurate to say that some users want animated GIFs. Not all of them.
Rasmus Fuhse Tue 12 Mar 2013 4:55PM
You're right. Not all want them. For myself I never had a GIF-avatar and think it's silly. But I still think that this is a reasonable feature for a lot of users. My timeline in Diaspora is full of animated GIFs, although I regularly unfollow people who are posting too many too large GIFs.
goob · Sun 21 Oct 2012 11:11PM
Ugh. Just when I thought I couldn't hate animated GIFs any more than I did before. That's a crime against good taste, if not against humanity itself.