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Populus

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 24, 2012
6,423
8,957
Spain, Europe
Okay, I tell you this beforehand: this isn’t as an important topic as site bugs or compatibility issues. However, I think it could improve the forum experience more than what people thinks. But it would entail a work that I understand nobody on the staff is willing to put into it. I could, if you want my help. Just contact me in private and we can talk about that (I’d do it for free, because I love this forum and I love you all; well, except when you delete one of my comments because off-topic/frivolous post (joking))

The issue: increasingly, new users don’t put effort in choosing an avatar. A personal avatar. Therefore, they are assigned a default avatar, which merely consist in a solid color, and there are a very limited amount of colors. Then, many users end up with the same color avatar and sometimes even the same letter.

This, specially for those of us with a smaller attention span, has a consequence: many times we end up mistaking who’s writing what comment, because two of them have exactly the same avatar color.

What’s my proposal? Having a lot more variety in stock avatars for new users, and maybe even replacing the current ones. Assigning random unique avatar to each user with a default avatar, we could achieve quick identification at the glance. We could take two different approaches for new random generated default avatars: 1) Exploring new shades of color or 2) generating through AI thousands of apple related images that could be assigned uniquely for each new user.

I don’t know how feasible it is to generate hundreds or thousands of unique avatars but if you have more ideas, we could explore it to make the forum richer and more unique.
 
I think anyone who is more serious about staying as a forum member will eventually pick something as their avatar. If I see a custom image then I assume they're more dedicated to being a community member because it shows some amount of thought was put into it (especially if they're funny or creative)

As for generating avatars, no thanks, gen-AI is a huge mess, and the amount of resources it takes to generate them is probably not worth it when basic text is far more quick and simple. And personally if I see a bot-created avatar, I'm also just going to assume I'm talking to a bot, which is not what I want to feel on a community of what I presume are humans.
 
I think anyone who is more serious about staying as a forum member will eventually pick something as their avatar. If I see a custom image then I assume they're more dedicated to being a community member because it shows some amount of thought was put into it (especially if they're funny or creative)

As for generating avatars, no thanks, gen-AI is a huge mess, and the amount of resources it takes to generate them is probably not worth it when basic text is far more quick and simple. And personally if I see a bot-created avatar, I'm also just going to assume I'm talking to a bot, which is not what I want to feel on a community of what I presume are humans.
GitHub uses a random avatar and color generator.
 
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Here's the avatar generated for me on GitHub:

Screenshot 2024-07-09 at 10.28.52.png

MacRumors uses XenForo for the forum software and there are add ons available to generate or choose from a selection from avatars
 
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Don't suppose animated GIFs are supported for custom avatars? I don't recall seeing any so my guess is no.
 
Don't suppose animated GIFs are supported for custom avatars? I don't recall seeing any so my guess is no.
They used to have support for that back in the olden days, when we were newbies:


standard100variant.gif


Now it doesn't seem to work properly inline in a post, even... :(

Edit 2: It might be me that have fudged it...so it won't repeat. That's what you get for messing with ±20 years old gifs. :p
 
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