If the avatar size was raised from 10k to maybe 30k, there would be much more scope for animation. Mine has gone very grainy!

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... Dave says

Great Avatar, Dave!

Is it a self-portrait, I assume?

Actually, raising the Avatar size beyond 10K would really slow down the loading of the pages for most users as there are usually several Avatars on the same page. Our Avatars are already bigger than on most other BBSes, which are usually a quarter of our size.

Your current Avatar could probably done is less than half of our allowed 10K and even look way better than now. Just a few pixels are changing in your animation, frame by frame. Try Adobe ImageReady (my choice) or another animated GIF editor/compressor.

With your great animated Avatar you'll have a good shot at winning a great prize in our on-going Best Online Identity competition! Now you'll just need a better e-mail signature and an Underblurb under your username, above the picture...

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Funny you should mention Adobe ImageReady, as I just installed it this morning. I just need to understand it now! It is a twisted self portrait thanks to some distortion in photoshop. I'll see if I can squash it down. I also have another version where I have a fly buzzing around and then I eat it when it comes by my mouth!!!

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... Dave says

Create your cells in a a small pallette gif say 16 colors. or use Flash to reduce the pixel contrast. It looks a bit cartoony but it works ok for most animations. Then don't use 100px square. that's just the max. I made mine a bit smaller to get under the limit then reduced from 12kb 14 cells to 9 cells and 9kb and a bit by dumping a few of the cells. Now it has 11 cells only I think.

You can supercompress in Gif Construction kit and alike so that gets rid of a lot of weight too.

Just a thought.

Thanks for that. I'll have a play.

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... Dave says

I got a handle on optimising graphics and stuff by looking at how the compression actually works. I found it helped me decide which way to go with something.

Say you have an uncompressed graphic made up of pixels. Each pixel, starting from the top left needs to be definded in code. For example for the top left pixel if it was red the graphic needs to have the following info.

Line=1 pixel=1 color=0000FF

then if the next pixel was red too, it would be

Line=1 pixel=2 color=0000FF

Lets say that the first 230 pixels of the top line were all red. You would need to write out that info into the graphic 230 times.

Simplistically put what Gif compression does is look for long lines of same colored pixels then do this.

Line=1 pixel=1 color=0000FF length=230

This takes up much less code so the graphic file becomes smaller in size.

So when you work with Gifs first you reduce the number of colors in the pallette to a minimum. When you do this you will be likely to get long lines of same colored pixels for the GIF to compress as above.

Gif compression usually works best with large solid color areas and graphical Text.

Well that's the idea anyway.

Thanks, Prof. GIF Animator!

That was a most comprehensive and scholarly explanation, worthy of a true Cyber-geek!

As a fellow geek, I have to commend you of the level of detail you have imparted upon us about the exotic subject of the technical intricacies of GIF-animation!

I'm just glad you didn't go into the advanced level GIF animation stuff like:

{L_CODE}:

transparency and masks,
editing GIF color tables,
rules of mapping them to full-color space,
number of bits and their sequence per color,
perceptive, selective or adaptive encoding,
pattern, stochastic or noisy dithering,
lossy GIF compressions with blur ratio,
all the new features of the GIF89a standard.

:bonk:

Hahaha, just kidding, Prof. GIF, thanks for a great job of explaining "GIF Animation 101".
<HR>
You guys are creating great animated GIFs now, raising the bar!

I've got to get cracking now to animate my own new Avatar,
I don't want to fall behind in this geek race...

P.S. Any of you guys want an Underblurb above your Avatar?

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UnderBlurb Over the Avatar. Lol

Hooray! That's got to be another world first for Lamma.

I'll have an Over UnderBlurb please. Shall we call it OverBlurb to keep things straight or just call everything Bruce?

The Geeky stuff. That's about as ungeeky as I could make it. Sorry.

How about an option in the user profile not to display avatars at all?

I don't want to offend anyone, but really I don't care to wait for people's cartoons to download, I just want to see the text. Otherwise, I'll just have to turn images off when I come to the site (yes, I have a modem, not broadband).

Hi Alan,

In another very very similar PHP forum board I visit you can access your setup prefs and choose to see avatars and other stuff or not depending on what you want to do. I just had a quick look round this board but can't find the personal preferences link. The option for turning thigs on and off is in the same section you edit your avatars. Maybe Web Dog or Gung can point you in the right direction.

Sorry, I haven't seen any personal preferences on this board either. I'd like to have them, too. Maybe they can be added as an option, but were not included in the board software setup, I believe. webdog?

But all the Avatars together on a regular page on this board (below 20K average right now) are smaller and quicker to load than a typical single header graphics on a regular web page. Also, every little Avatar needs to be loaded only once within the entire board, independent of how many pages you look at.

Avatars also make this board look definitely much more attractive and appealing and personalised than other text-only boards. You can even win a great prize for designing a really nice Avatar as part of the Coolest Online Identity competition.

To make it clear: We love Avatars and encourage our members STRONGLY to use them (only a few use them so far). But the less KB the better and definitely below 10KB!

Cheshire K@, what Underblurb would you like?Up to 40 characters.

It's called an Underblurb, because it's a Blurb Under your username, like a subtitle. Actually, it's just a ranking title (Frequent Poster, Moderator, Site Admin, etc.) that webdog cleverly abused to give our members a further way of personalising their messages.

Dave, what should your Underblurb be?
Anybody else?

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Logically they'd be on the <a href="http://www.lamma.com.hk/forum/profile.php?mode=editprofile"> profile page</a>, where you set up other things. Since there's already an avatar section, that's where you could have an option not to show them.

Anyway, if you love them, that's fine. I don't want to stop anyone using them. I just would prefer to get the page faster and not to see them at all.

Hi Alan, Gung.

This is the board I was using:

Powered by: vBulletin Version 2.0.0
Copyright ©2000, 2001, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited.

This board is so similar I thought the Lamma version was just an upgrade with better graphics and a more attractive color scheme curtesy of WD and LG.

I went to check and there is both an Edit Profile and Edit Optionssection in the vBulletin Version.

Some of the options for viewing stuff are:

Show user's signatures in their posts? yes no
Show user's avatar in their posts? yes no
Show image attachments and [img] code in Posts?
Selecting no will show a hyperlink instead. yes no

Maybe this section doesn't exist on this board. WebDog where are you? We have a stick to throw for you to fetch.

I connect through cable 24/7 at 512Kb/sec (managing 300Kb/sec plus most of the time) so I am happy with the avatars. However if I was on AOL dial-up or something at 0.34kb/sec I guess I would consider turning off avatars if I could.

Worth checking for those that are on a slow connection. If there is no built in section for this it would be easy to add a yes no checkbox or radio button field to the profile section, add a new column to the dBase then run an if/else fork round the Avatar img code.


Lamma Gung: RE Underblurb. Site Titles Eh?

Ok I'll have :

Line 1 : Lord of Micturition
Line 2 : Keeper of the spoon

Many thanks

I have no idea what my underblurb should be. My brain is fried. Any suggestions?

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... Dave says

Sorry Dave,

Don't know you very well to help with anything apt.

You seem a brainy type though.

How about.

Senior Lecturer
Dept. of Budgerigars

Or something simple like.

"You'll not catch me without me trousers"

"My brain is fried."

"Chow Brain"

RE: that turning Avatar on and off.

Once youve got the info into the dBase which is a simple SQL insert or update I think the PHP fork would look something like this.

Example:if the YES/NO field was called "image_on" and you are using MySQL and the user record was 361. Probably need the table name in there somewhere



I'm a ColdFusion man so sorry my PHP is rubbish. Anyway I'm sure WebDog will know if he set this lot up LOL.

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K@,
I think you've frightened webdog with those lines of codes, he must be hiding somewhere now...
He's not a programmer like us guys. phpBB can be set up pretty easily without knowing php, it's a great and FREE open source app.
I don't know exactly, but webdog (a great guy) must have had some help in the setup, he's not in the IT/Internet business at all.

My own php is rusty as well. I'm also just too busy with designing and programming two more websites over this weekend for clients to bother about trying to program an Avatar on/off switch on this board. Maybe later...

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