Quote:
Originally Posted by relentlessflame
(Disclaimer: these are all my own personal opinions, and should not be taken as an official policy statement on behalf of the site staff.)
I guess I'll take up the "moderately against" argument. I'm not generally a fan of animations in avatars, because I think they're typically poorly-done and distracting. I don't think this is just due to a file size limit, like "oh I could only make an annoying animation because I don't have enough frames"; usually, I think it's more an issue of concept/design than execution. I suspect that allowing double the file size for the same 100x100 pixel square will just encourage people to use that much more animation, and it isn't something I see as so important to encourage. I would rather the page load more quickly on my sadly-not-too-great broadband connection (1.5 mbps) and mobile phone when on 3G (which has a 1 GB monthly data cap). I'm not convinced that increasing the file size limit will encourage most people to make better avatars, but just to be more wasteful/sloppy and do less optimizing -- it'll could double the data pulled for some avatars without any tangible benefit to me.
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If not for a recent policy/format update by Anime Suki (I'll get to that in a second), your argument here would be compelling to me, perhaps even an understandable "deal-breaker" against increasing from a 50 Kb limit to a 100 Kb limit.
It's certainly true that, depending on an individual AS member's taste, increasing from a 50 Kb limit to a 100 Kb may result in gif avatars that you
already find obnoxious likely getting
that much more obnoxious.
However, there's already a handy-dandy method for dealing with that - The recently added ability to block individual avatars/sigs. Most gif avatars that I find distracting to a bothersome degree are ones that I've already set to block. If a few more end up like that due to an avatar/sig Kb size increase, then I'll just block a few more. This is something that all AS members can now do, of course.
But now, what if we have even just a few skillful avatar/sig makers on this site (which I have no doubt of) that could do so much more with an increase from 50 Kb to 100 Kb? While avatars already disliked may end up seeming worse, some avatars will get better. Some avatar makers are likely to take advantage of the increase to make crisper, cleaner, smoother images.
So it seems to me that most (all?) of the potential downsides of a 50 Kb to 100 Kb increase can be negated by the block avatar/sig function, while the potential upside remains. If the net effect of increasing Kb size limits for avatar/sigs is that a few more get blocked, but some of the ones we still see look better, then I think that's a net gain myself.
Now I don't care a great deal about this issue, but I have to admit I'm curious to see what the avatar/sig makers of this site could do with extra Kb to work with.