TVPast Forums - How to Submit an AVATAR

To get an avatar up, do these three things:

1. Find an image you want online (or make it yourself). Resize to 64x64 in photo software.

2. Upload it to your CPS photo album. Read the sticky on how to use the photo album in the "Forum Information" area of CPS.

3. Send me the
-- (A) image link / a.k.a. web address / a.k.a. URL / a.k.a. location,
-- (B) name of the image, as displayed when a mouse hovers over it
-- (C) let me know if this is for anybody to use, or just for you to use

That's it. Three steps. And I'll upload it ASAP for you.

__________________________________________________ _________________

So how'd it break, you ask?
Well, you guys that used it are the ones that broke it! [:x)]
It also explains why CPS would crash from time to time with "no reason".

Problems I found and fixed:

--- Some of you were injecting HTML and JS code into the image location, for whatever weird reason! It needed to be the HTTP://IMAGELOCATION and that was all.

--- Too much hotlinking! Have you ever been to a myspace page that would not load? It was trying to load too much crap from too many places -- many of which did not want you to hotlink. I've moved everything to our server. The avatars page was 6MB (6000k) -- an HTML page is never supposed to be more than 100k, much less 6000k. This was the biggest reason for server crashes.

--- Images were too large! Some of you were trying to use 1024x768 wallpapers -- without resizing -- as avatars. You must resize to our avatar size of 64x64 before using them.

--- Some of you were taking community avatars and marking them for yourself. One person alone had horded about 15 for himself, and they were meant for anybody.

It took me about an hour to go through and fix this. Some avatars had to be deleted. Most were kept.

The avatar system on this particular piece of software running our forum is "too open" so it'll have to be a situation where anybody who wants an avatar needs to do the 3-step instructions above.

Should we decide to upgrade forum software in late 2008 or sometime in 2009, this will be just one more aspect to consider. I think better avatar management (less problems possible) is built into newer forum software, thankfully.