OK, everyone, I would like to announce that the site will now support avatars from my other (new) venture - Avatarity. You can set your avatar in by going to your profile page - it will be visible in your profile, and in the forums.

How do you set it from your profile? I am still confused as to that part.

When I clicked on "Your information" and "Edit your info" I couldn't find that avatar thing anywhere.

It doesn't appear there though... I don't know if I am not looking in the right spot, but all I see is the normal stuff.

Here is my test account, and it works here, but it doesn't work for Gamer... I don't know why...

Its the same for me...

HOORAY! I just did the same as Gamer and it worked OK.

I had no problem. Really Simple. Thanks Gamer and Lewis for helping levik work out the bugs. :)

I'm not sure what exactly you guys were missing - If you tell me which link didn't show up for your old accounts, I will try to fix this.

Also, DJ, I really didn't understand what you were saying about smileys and the forums.

Just to be clear, you DO NOT NEED to sign up on avatarity to use one of the avatars on perplexus. The only limitation is the 64x64 pixel dimensions, which rules out most of the Street Fighter animations...

Maybe it is specific to your browser. I see nothing wrong. I'm using Netscape 7.01.

Let levik know what browser you are using, and then maybe he can repeat the problem, and find a solution.

Oh, and levik -- what I think DJ was talking about: one of the ads that's been appearring lately in the right-hand column is for animated smiley icons. He may have thought that that was another venture of yours.

Seems to have been some weird problem with IE. I changed the HTML for the avatar box a bit, so hopefully it will now work for everyone. Do let me know if that's not the case.

problem comments and forum, and public profile all get TU from me. Anyways levik does our avatar have to be from avatarity.com? or is it possible to find our own sprites?

Personally, I think avatars would be too much of a distraction in the comments.

Right now you have to pick an avatar through Avatarity - however if you want to use your own, you can sign up with Avatarity and submit the avatar there. If you don't wish to share it with others, you can make it private.

As far as comments and avatars go, I was thinking of only showing one avatar of the poster of the comment you are currently looking at (since comments are shown one at a time.

The cool thing is all your comment's avatars change when you change your avatar... See I changed to cloud now... :)

Personally, it would be harder to remember people's avatars than people's names. I think it would be just memorization for me to remember whose aviatars were what... For example, I don't look like a cloud or a dinosaur, and except for when you are groaning that Marbles Bonanza isn't going to the top of the queue, you probably don't look like your avatar either :)

"Our brains"? It has always seemed to me that associating words with a person is easier to me than to associate a graphic with a person... particularly if the graphic doesn't make sense with the person.

This may be because when I refer to a person, I use the screen name rather than the avatar (or something else identifying)...

I posted this earlier, but for some reason it's not showing up -- probably I just forgot to hit the 'Post' button.

Anyway, I know the difference between an ad banner and the rest of the page..I'm talking about the flooble forum (there's only one - http://forum.flooble.com); when you sign up there are a hundred twenty-something smiley face avatars you can pick from. I was just suggesting that you make those available on Avatarity (and, in turn, on here). It would be an easy, quick way to add a good number of images to the listing (plus there's one there that I really like)..

I like the idea of showing the avatar in problem comments, especially since many people don't visit the forums or other people's info pages, and as levik said, it's a good way to visually associate people. Obviously, you would still refer to people by their screen name, but the pictures are nice, and if we're going to have them, you can be sure that they'll be seen more in problem comments, than anywhere else. The only other place, maybe, is next to the author of a problem that you're looking at, as well as the author of the comment you are viewing, but anything more than that might be overkill.

I also like the idea of 'reserving' icons in use by Journeymen and up (since I fit into that category), because there are not an overwhelming number of us, and I think it will make it easier to recognize the people who are always around and always contributing, or at least prevent any confusion.

No need to apologize.. I'm just surprised that levik didn't know what I was talking about.

DJ: I set up that forum over a year ago, and the avtars on it came canned with the software. I never really paid much attention to them which is why I initially didn't understand you. Yes, I too sometimes get lost in the complexities of all things flooble.

Gamer: My idea would only ban someone from switching to an avatar in use by a high ranking member. If you as a high ranking member wanted to switch your avatar to something that's already used by a novice, it would not affect anyone (the novice doesn't get kicked, but perhaps you get notified that someone else is using the avatar of your choice)

I just found out that I'm allergic to avatars... *sigh*

P.S. I think dynamic loading of one's own 64x64 pixel image (checked to make sure that it's not bigger than say... 1024 bytes or something) would be really cool. Then one could guarantee a unique avatar (well almost... I suppose someone could copy it and change a pixel or something).

cool... you're a step ahead of me, then.