Does this website support animated gifs for profile icons?

Just curious... I thought it was time for a makeover.

Also, is there a better place to put this? Well, actually, it's a simple yes or no question anyway.

Edit: Wait, I'm an idiot, bazz has one... That was pointless.

If it belongs somewhere, it's probably on the forum section about board maintenance: viewforum.php?f=13

I dunno why you have to ask the question though, just upload a GIF as your avatar and see what happens.

It's because it's not built yet, and I don't want to waste my time if it's not possible.

If he hasn't made the GIF already, asking before he starts could save him some time, and he might not want to have a random unrelated GIF stolen from somewhere as his avatar for a few seconds while testing. The question really should be in the phpBB section, though.

There's a lot of people on the forum with animated avatars, so it's definitely supported.

If he'd just uploaded a random GIF his question would have been answered several minutes ago. I could test it myself right now, but I'm trying to encourage the principle of learning things for yourself, so I'd rather waste more time typing this response than it would take just to figure out the answer and tell him. Principles, right? Hrm.

Why would a few seconds of avatar being "wrong" be a problem?

I don't know, maybe he's having a conversation with someone and doesn't want to confuse that person? Or maybe he just doesn't want to be associated with random images in case someone sees the temporary avatar. Whatever. I wouldn't mind having a wrong avatar for a few seconds, but maybe someone else does.

Yes.

NOO!!! I didn't know there was a file size limit of only 20KB...

Somehow, I'll try and make this smaller: (I'll only have room for about 3 frames. )


Edit: Screw it, it's impossible to make it look good. I thought I was exaggerating by saying 3 frames, but it actually has to be that (and 80x80 pixels instead of 100x100.)

Animated GIF size restrictions just reminded me of the time in Nsider fourms when I programed some lossy compression scheme to produce a 121 framed 129KB GIF file.
I've completely forgot what the original size was but I can dig up those old files from my archive if you are interested.

Edit: I removed the image embed, as the image itself wasn't really relevant.

Sounds good.

You can always host the image yourself to avoid any size limits. But please be thoughtful of other users of the forum who might be on limited connections and may not want to download multi-megabyte avatars.

<-- Thought I'm just not active enough to have people noticed my avatar(or they just didn't wait enough).

Every animated avatar I've seen on NESDev so far is relatively subdued, but a busy, bright animated avatar will irritate more than a couple people.

If you want an animated avatar, you know where to find it.

Better than a live action one...

Anyway, it's all good now. I got an imgur profile for this sole purpose.

345k for that.

Very little, I know.

...Now that I look at it though, it's a bit distracting...

To follow up with the excavation of my old files, I did not find what my animated GIF would of been without the hack filter but I imagine it was probably about 300KB.
I did however find my image prepossessing program that made the temporal lossyness.
In pseudocode it basically did this to each frame before they were inputed into GIMP for conversion to GIF:

Nate to self: Never again leave your folders and files nameless (like "New Bitmap (2).bmp" in folder "temp5"), it makes them very hard to search for after 10 years.

Yeah, great: Content-Length: 354004. That isn't gonna piss anyone off on a latent connection, mobile, or cellular data. imgur also doesn't support gzip or deflate compression, so it's a full 354KB no matter what:



*double facepalm* At least it's hosted at imgur and not an upload here (I don't think the forum avatar upload would allow such sizes, I forget what we set the limit at).

As for "small-ifying a GIF", ImageMagick has an entire page dedicated to just that. If you have source material in a video format (ex. you want to convert AVI and a codec ImageMagick understands to GIF), there's a page on that too.

I already added it to my adblock list....

To be fair, the image formats hosted by imgur already use compression; there's not going to be much incremental improvement other than compressing GIF's (normally uncompressed) palette.

You're right, I forgot about that. I'll play tepples for a moment: but not all GIFs (animated or otherwise) use LZ77/LZW compression due to the patent debate. Sure, that patent expired in 2004, but there's really no way to guarantee every GIF file ever created is using compression, or that whatever was used to create a GIF present-day makes use of LZW or not (software being used may be "old" and by default *not* use LZW due to the patent concerns, and user has no idea that they should turn it on).

That said: use of deflate or gzip on GIFs using LZW can/does help. On Espozo's avatar, the actual transferred payload goes from 345KBytes to 306KBytes (39KB savings) using gzip (and I did turn on DEFLATE/gzip for .gif files in this context). In other words: gzip's compression model seems to work semi-well on this file, despite it using LZW (I checked):


Verification of LZW use in that GIF:

Anyway, point is: animated GIFs (especially ones with lots of frames or visuals) are extremely annoying, waste bandwidth, and really bring absolutely nothing to the table. When I was younger (back in the days when animated GIFs were the hot new thing), sure, I made several myself and they were prolific (esp. on Geocities). Those of us from that era now find them quite annoying (cuz people do stupid things like make 2-3MByte animated GIFs from portions of an anime, for example), especially if hosted by infrastructures or platforms which don't support caching. I myself do use an animated GIF avatar on occasion, but guess how big the file is? 3.9KBytes; I think it's like 4 frames of animation (edit: it's 6). Not too distracting either.

Am I the only one who wish those were banned? I find those to be extremely annoying. In a few cases, like when the animation is really subtle it could be acceptable, but in, say, 85% of cases, animated gifs as avatar really annoys me.

It's 20k.

Don't worry, though, this ugly distracting animation is worth more than 17 other avatars. Believe me.

Yeah, I've got 200mb on my cell phone, so the thought of an extra 330k just for reading an NesDev thread featuring Espozo doesn't thrill me.

161KB

82KB

There are certainly ways to get it even smaller but... eh.
Edit: Mine's currently 4KB, but it can apparently be 1,273 bytes with absolutely no changes. I think I'd rather just reanimate it at some point if I ever change it.
Edit2: For completeness, here's one that's 300KB and 100% the same visually (I think):

That's your problem.


It's nice to know you guys like it. If it's truly the largest dilemma since WWII, I'll just revert back.

I do find your new avatar pretty distracting and slightly annoying. When you asked about animated avatars I imagined you were going to make something original and relevant, not rip a video that wasn't made for small viewports and doesn't even loop. Not looping is a serious offense in an animated avatar, because it constantly draws attention when the animation wraps back to the beginning.

And unless you're willing to help solve the problem by paying rainwarrior's overage fees, you are part of the problem. Occasionally I tether my laptop to my aunt's phone when we go on long trips, and when I tether, I stick to low-bandwidth sites such as forums.nesdev.com. (I also turn on Firefox's tracking protection for its side effect of blocking advertisers that track users' interests across sites, which has the side effect of blocking the most data-heavy ads.) So with two admitted occasional users of cellular Internet here and a distracting rewind, I may end up taking one representative frame from the GIF to produce a PNG avatar.

My last avatar wasn't either. Anyway, when I get home, I'll change it. I don't know what else to use though, probably just the other one.

Oh no, I think your over-the-top avatar ate rainwarrior's avatar.

That can't be good.

'Hide your wife. Hide your kids.'

Yeah, I had to get rid of it. Doesn't surprise me though, because the sole purpose of it was to be a dick. (It's the "super-large", "obnoxious", "distracting" avatar on "rainwarrior's phone")


I believe it's "Hide your kids. Hide your wife". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl9vouECjgs

LOL what did I miss?

A 'shopped flip phone occupying approximately the lower left eighth of your user icon.

With the icon in the screen, (although it was too small to really be made out). It's already deleted though, unless you want me to remake it.

<_< No need to remake it, I found it using firefox's cache....

download/file.php?avatar=6683_1461016544.png

Heh, I think the description fills me in pretty much.

Incidentally, I miss my first cell phone, which was a tiny white flip-phone (Sony Ericsson w350i). I kinda hate how gigantic they've all become.

I'm intrigued by the thought that you were so intent on deleting the image forever that you emptied your recycle bin too.

edit: heh, thanks lidnariq

And I found an "HTTP 404 Not Found" when I clicked that link.


Oh, I do that with everything, and regret it most of the time...