these avatar sizes are so small theyre virtually useless. 75x75 pixels is shit i had to contend with back in the early 90s with just-starting BBSs due to the fastest internet speeds being about 25 baud.
I keep them disabled most of the time tbh, but they do serve the primary purpose of making authors generally identifiable at a glance. I'll admit, they do a mediocre to poor job of letting users express themselves or communicate something on every post. I'm OK with that since I don't really care about users expressing themselves via avatars.
That might read kinda hostile but I don't mean it that way. It's just not part of the design goals of the forum to facilitate personal expression via badges or personal designs. It's the same reason we don't have automatic signatures.
I added avatars because they facilitate quicker scanning of pages, they are useful that way and quick/loose author identification does serve the design goals. But I'd have put in gravatars if they actually did anything to distinguish posters.
On the other hand we have to pay something for larger avatars. Pages get vertically stretched as they get bigger (and vertical conservation of space is pretty important on phone screens) and it costs bandwidth. Working on low end hardware was an explicit goal of the project so in addition to aggressive caching strategies I try to minimize payload sizes as much as possible. And if you disable image/video embedding but leave avatars on then (which is kind of the "max privacy" option) then the majority of the data transfer in a cold-cache page load is in the form of avatars. Every extra byte allowed in avatars hurts load stats while providing no real benefit by the rubric I've set out for the software.
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post didn't die in a fire!
