The current size seems arbitrarily small, I know for a fact phpBB can support up to 188x300 without tables starting to stretch in wonky ways, so why not make that the max size?

i agree, there are loads of pics and pixels and art pieces i'd like to use for my avatar, but they are all too big.

The current avatar size is fine. You can clearly see people's avatars and your average post is about 75% wasted space. If the avatar size were raised to 188x300 most posts would look like this: [img]http://i.imgur.com/3bSnVb5.png[/img] (Not to pick on you, Yoshin) I would not be opposed to widening the current avatar size, however. Do that and just add another column or two onto the badge table.

nah, sigs waste WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more space not a good reason to force small avatars

Maybe try and increase the size according to the avatar pic and have a much less strict limit on how big the pic is?

give me the big avy

Personally, I'm fine with the current size. I think it's perfect for being compact without sacrificing readability.

ok but with sigs being as gigantic as they get I don't feel like thats much of an issue.

Hey how about that b i g a v y ? ?

I don't get the anti-large avatar feelings, it isn't 2006. We can make them bigger and posts wont suffer, or heck if people don't like the size I proposed find a size smaller but still bigger then what we have.

I'm not a fan of making the avatars taller. They'd make the posts bigger and increase the amount of scrolling necessary to view the boards, unless we removed the badges from posts, and I'd rather emphasize badges (things people have actually contributed) than bigger pictures of anime chicks. It would be cool if you could upload whatever size avatar you wanted, and the forums would automatically scale/crop it to fit - lots of other forums and social networks do this, although phpBB is ancient and that's maybe asking too much. I'd also like to emphasize that avatar sizes aren't set in stone - if lots of people prefer a certain size or orientation, we can tinker with the settings. It might not be feasible to change anything before the new forum software is released, though.

I personally feel like badges could take up less space, at the end of the day they're just e-peen[size=50](what a term)[/size] and then some of that space given to avatars. This sort of mentality is exactly what's keeping MFGG in the past. And again sigs can get gigantic and nobody bats an eye. As a compromise I feel like at least a 170px square should please everyone.

I personally wouldn't be against a longer avatar, not necessarily much wider. Long sigs seem to be fairly rare, depending on your definition of "long".

[quote="Yoshin"]I personally feel like badges could take up less space, at the end of the day they're just e-peen[size=50](what a term)[/size] and then some of that space given to avatars. This sort of mentality is exactly what's keeping MFGG in the past.[/quote] Badges are a reward for participating in the forum. There is value in seeing the contributions and talents of an individual member alongside their posts.

[quote="Magnemania"][quote="Yoshin"]I personally feel like badges could take up less space, at the end of the day they're just e-peen[size=50](what a term)[/size] and then some of that space given to avatars. This sort of mentality is exactly what's keeping MFGG in the past.[/quote] Badges are a reward for participating in the forum. There is value in seeing the contributions and talents of an individual member alongside their posts.[/quote] Well said.

then make it so you can show your top 5 badges (or some other reasonable amount of badges) and have the rest on your profile or something seems like a no-brainer solution. more than a handful of users (myself including) are starting to lean towards having 5-6 rows of badges which is an insane mount of space for something that could be going towards avatar space

I'd rather just see a toggle for badges so people could hide them, same as people can hide sigs or avatars already.

If you also made the avatars wider, it would solve the badge problem. Then you could have MORE BADGES PER ROW!