What's with the huge gifs for avatars?

[Stopshere2]

The trend towards members using large gifs for their avatars has got out of hand.

It just took me over 12Mb to load this page Has been handled (HMFFL) ridiculous 8.3Mb avatar of ... who knows what she is.

I've also had a couple of pages recently that took over 15Mb and that's a real problem on my capped wireless internet plan. It can also make page loads painfully slow. The biggest avatar I've come across is by Chosen01 and is an 8.4Mb gif of Lebron looking miffed that he didn't win allstar mvp. Wow!

I know I can turn off avatars and signatures but they obviously make it easier to identify posters quickly and they provide a bit of colour to what is a text-based format.

I'm not saying we have to strictly adhere to realgm's avatar limit of 80x80 pixels and 48.83Kb but a line has to be drawn somewhere before we're all watching full-length movies less than the size of a postage stamp. Most of these gifs are much larger than 80x80 and distort badly when forced into the little box. It is just **** stupid!

I've got around 25 examples of avatars over 2Mb just on the General Board. Even imageboards and chans have a size limit of 1Mb or 2Mb. The funny thing is there's hardly a sig that's over 200Kb even though there's heaps more room for creativity and it can actually be seen.

Ultimately, realgm's bandwidth suffers and someone is paying for this crap to sit on the site and be downloaded a gazillion times. Can we get a policy from admin that makes some sense and limits the avatar size?

[HMFFL]

Just report them if you feel it's necessary (Just not excessively). You can pm me the ones that give you problems and I will look them over. Having to click on avatars to check for the sizes will make a mod want to retire, so I doubt any of us sign-on to do it. Signatures are easy to spot by glancing at them and take less effort.

There is already a policy.

4) Avatars

Users are permitted to link to a picture for use as an avatar. User defined avatars are to be no larger than 80 pixels square, contain no image which attempts to portray the user as having an official status here (e.g. mimicking ranks or copying avatars of Moderators), may not exceed 35KB in file size and have a consistently high availability (i.e. links to images on slow servers or those prone to failure may be removed).

1. Avatars are subject to the same conditions as posts with respect to decency, and so forth.
2. Users abusing these rules will be warned and/or may lose their avatar privileges