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Thread: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
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2019-11-04, 01:22 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
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- Birmingham, AL
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Setting Up A Custom Avatar
This guide is intended to lay out the steps necessary to set up a custom avatar to display on each of your posts. It is suggested you read over the Avatar & Signature Rules before you get started so that you don't run into any problems later.
The guide assumes you already have an appropriate avatar image and have uploaded it to appropriate webspace. You must have the rights to use this image as an avatar, and it must be hosted on a website that allows you to hotlink the image as an avatar. General information about these steps is provided in Appendix B.
Part 1: Get the URL
- Make sure you have the image's URL address. Have it open in a separate window or copy/pasted into a document so you can grab it easily.
- The image URL needs to be complete - this means you must include the "https://" prefix, and have the full address to the exact file (ending with the ".jpg", ".gif", or ".png" file extension).
- Make sure there are no spaces (" " or "%20") or special characters in the address after "https://", other than dashes ("-"), underscores ("_"), and the directory separator ("/").
- There must be nothing after the final ".jpg", ".gif", or ".png" file extension.
- URLs may be no longer than 128 characters.
Part 2: Get to the Correct Settings Page
- From any page on the GiantITP forums, click on the Settings option in the upper right toolbar.
- In the My Settings panel on the left, under the second section My Account, click on General Settings.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the page.
- In the third setting from the bottom, Avatar, select the Custom radio button.
Part 3: Change the Avatar
- In the Custom Avatar URL field, paste or type the URL of the image you wish to use.
Please note: The prefix must be "https://". If the prefix is "http://", without the "s", you will receive an error for incorrect format. The URL will often be case sensitive as well. - Click on Save Changes. The page will refresh.
- To make sure the avatar is displaying correctly, click on your username in the upper right toolbar. The image should appear under your name and forum title.
- Congratulations on your new custom avatar!
Please note: The mobile version of the site, Playground Sand, will not display custom avatars. Whatever is selected in the Order of the Stick Avatar dropdown menu will display instead. Changing the Order of the Stick Avatar will only affect your avatar in Playground Sand; so long as Custom is selected in the Avatar field, the desktop version will always display the custom image.
Spoiler: Appendix A: TroubleshootingIf your image is not showing up, first make sure the site has fully reloaded and is not simply pulling from your browser cache (press Ctrl+F5 to force a complete reload of the page or, if on a Mac, try Control-Command-R or Shift-Command-R depending on your browser).
If the image still does not show up, make sure the URL is correct, and that the hosting site permits the hotlinking of images for avatars. Many previously used image hosting sites do not allow hotlinking for avatars. Some hosting sites that have disabled hotlinking/embedded images have been disallowed - for example, any URLs from imgur will return an error for incorrect format.
The image URL is usually case sensitive - if there are any capitalizations, make sure to have these match.
The board software does not support spaces or most special characters. These will show up as "%##" in the URL; spaces are "%20" and are the most common problem in a URL that prevents an avatar from showing up. Dashes and underscores ("-" and "_") are allowed; remove any spaces or replace them with these characters.
Make sure the image actually is a .gif, a .jpg, or a .png. If it is not, you will need to convert it into one of these formats or find another image.
Finally, try opening the image in a separate window to make sure it shows up at all. Your hosting site may be down, the image may not have uploaded correctly or have been deleted, or something else may be preventing the image from loading at all.
If none of this corrects the problem, please feel free to ask for help.Spoiler: Appendix B: Acquiring an AvatarAcquiring a custom avatar is actually relatively easy. You can check out the custom avatar request and avatar adoption threads for OotS style avatars, or you can always make your own.
On the GiantITP forums, you may use a .gif, .jpg, or .png image. The image can have a width of 20-120 pixels, and a height of 20-120 pixels.
To double check these variables to make sure an image would fit within the rules, on most browsers you can right click (or optionally Control + click on Mac) on the image and select "Properties". This will display the image height and width in pixels, its URL, and its size. Right clicking generally also allows you to save the image. Some websites disable right clicking on images, however.
.gif and .png images both support transparency, while .jpg does not. Also please keep in mind that animated .gif images are not allowed as avatars.Last edited by Peelee; 2020-03-14 at 12:53 PM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2019-11-04, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
- Location
- Birmingham, AL
- Gender
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Reserved 1
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2019-11-04, 09:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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- Birmingham, AL
- Gender
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Reserved 2
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2019-11-05, 08:49 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
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- Birmingham, AL
- Gender
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Reserved 3
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2019-12-04, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2006
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- Watching the world go by
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
As a note, if an avatar uses a transparent or forum tan background and is much too big, it might appear to be blank even if it is loading properly. The forum software loads the top 120 x 120 pixels of the image into the frame, and if they happen to look like the forum background, then it looks like nothing shows up.
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2020-02-22, 07:20 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Currently, at https://forums.giantitp.com/profile.php?do=editoptions
it now says "Type in the URL to your custom avatar. The URL must start with https://"
But neither https://i.imgur.com/UYzwSs1.jpg nor http://i.imgur.com/UYzwSs1.jpg are accepted (error message: "You did not enter the correct format for the Custom Avatar URL field. Please read the field description for the expected format.")Last edited by WurmD; 2020-02-22 at 07:22 AM.
- A book in the making: http://forums.giantitp.com/showthrea...-the-Barbarian Add to it! :D
- Debugging Destiny: A neat minimalistic comic :)
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2020-02-22, 07:24 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2005
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- Australia
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
"My Hobby: Replacing your soap with gravy" by rtg0922, Doll and Clint "Rawhide" Eastwood by Sneak
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2020-02-22, 07:56 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Would you code in an extra check?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ycg92nwn22...l150.png?raw=1 does not tecnically end in ".png" and this is not currently accepted, but is a great way to host images
A fast hack could be, besides checking if file ends in
- .jpg
- .gif
- .png
also check if ends in
- .jpg?raw=1
- .gif?raw=1
- .png?raw=1- A book in the making: http://forums.giantitp.com/showthrea...-the-Barbarian Add to it! :D
- Debugging Destiny: A neat minimalistic comic :)
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2020-02-22, 07:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2005
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- Australia
- Gender
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2020-02-22, 12:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2012
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- Canada
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2020-02-22, 12:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2012
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
I'm curious as to why imgur is blocked too
I just used https://imgbb.com/ to host mine- A book in the making: http://forums.giantitp.com/showthrea...-the-Barbarian Add to it! :D
- Debugging Destiny: A neat minimalistic comic :)
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2020-02-22, 01:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2014
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
I would imagine that it's because imgur ToS specifically prevents hotlinking as avatars, and as GitP was a site that happened to use a lot of traffic for that, they blocked us. So, anyone whose browser didn't include something to scrub the traffic as having come from GitP (or another large site imgur had blocked) did not display any of the imgur images anywhere.
Basically, this is just enforcing the imgur ToS with regards to avatars, as far as I understand it.
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2020-02-22, 06:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2009
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- Ontario
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DM in Mummy's Mask I, II, III | Keshkaru and Ozkrak in Extinction Curse | Marzena in Age of Worms | Elrembriel in Wrath of the Righteous | Gurmok in Nightmare in Katapesh | DM in Catacombs of Ravenloft Avatar courtesy of Neoseph7
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2020-02-24, 08:00 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2019
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Could this please be mentioned in the instructions, ideally in the settings page but at the very least in the post here? And if you put in an imgur URL anyway, could the error message please explain this specifically, instead of saying that it’s an “incorrect format” (which it isn’t)? Ultimately it didn’t me take so long to find my way here and figure out what was wrong, but it certainly took a whole lot longer than it should have, and it is utterly trivial to imagine someone giving up before finding their way to the 6th post in a forum thread to shed any light on this mystery whatsoever.
The instructions displayed, as well as the resulting error, are wrong. This is a bug.
I’m about 95% sure this is untrue. Imgur offers “direct link” URLs as part of its little sidebar of options when you upload anything, as well as HTML, BBcode, and Markdown that would all embed the image—none of that would make sense for a site that is not providing an image-hosting service. Numerous sites use imgur as their primary image host for user content, without any apparent difficulty. Stack Overflow even goes so far as to re-upload things hosted elsewhere onto imgur for use in its questions and answers.
Certainly, nothing on this usage guidance for imgur users who want to use imgur for forums suggests that imgur would have any problem with this usage, assuming the image isn’t adult or illegal (which would obviously be against forum rules anyway).Last edited by FēlīxPersōnārum; 2020-02-24 at 08:14 PM.
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2020-02-24, 08:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2005
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- Australia
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2020-02-24, 09:23 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2014
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
In that very page you linked, under "What can't I use Imgur for?" it says:
You're welcome to use Imgur to host your images, as long as they do not break our Terms of Service. This prohibits using Imgur in the following ways.
- As a content delivery network (CDN). This includes web objects like logos, avatars, icons, banners, and more.
[…]
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2020-02-25, 08:57 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Rawhide, at https://forums.giantitp.com/profile.php?do=editoptions it says
Type in the URL to your custom avatar. The URL must start with https:// and the avatar must end in .gif, .jpg or .png. URLs with spaces and certain characters will not work. For example: https://www.example.com/avatars/avatar.gif
Reminder: Animated avatars are not allowed.- A book in the making: http://forums.giantitp.com/showthrea...-the-Barbarian Add to it! :D
- Debugging Destiny: A neat minimalistic comic :)
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2020-07-08, 02:00 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
- Location
- Birmingham, AL
- Gender
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2020-07-21, 01:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2009
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
I'm pretty sure they weren't saying anything about animated gifs, there.
The error message says "You did not enter the correct format for the Custom Avatar URL field. Please read the field description for the expected format." The field description does not include an actionable format specification for this error. It took me several Google/forum searches to determine that imgur is not "a website which allows image hotlinking for avatars". A list of the 2-5 most common image hosting sites which do not allow hotlinking for avatars would make this far more helpful.
Respectfully, that's really not how that works. If the error message can't be changed, this is an unfixable bug, but it's still a bug.
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2020-07-21, 01:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2005
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- Australia
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2020-07-21, 04:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
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- Birmingham, AL
- Gender
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
This guide states explicitly lists imgur as an example of such sites:This guide is intended to instruct users how to upload a custom avatar and help solve common problems users may have. It is not intended to give a list of hosting sites that disallow (or do allow) image hosting services, in no small part due to the mutable nature of such sites, their popularity, and their policies.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 1
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2020-09-01, 02:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2020
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- Freehold NJ USA
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Thanks, i had trouble;
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2022-07-09, 05:59 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
So what sites can be used? I tried the one WurmD suggested but none of the links it provides work. Anyone have other suggestions?
Would be awesome if we could just upload a picture from our own computers.Lelouch vi Britannia by Gnomish Wanderer
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2022-07-11, 02:14 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2011
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- Sharangar's Revenge
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Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
I've got my avatar stored on a free dropbox account. I've also stored some image files on Discord
Last edited by Lord Torath; 2022-07-11 at 02:14 PM.
Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
Thri-Kreen Ranger/Psionicist by me, based off of Rich's A Monster for Every Season
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2022-07-12, 02:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2012
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2022-07-29, 02:23 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2012
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
I've got a question about avatar urls. I was trying to use this one here as an example:
https://i.imgur.com/KMtIaRl.png
It starts with https:// and it ends with .png. However when I tried to update my avatar to this url I get an error message. "You did not enter the correct format for the Custom Avatar URL field. Please read the field description for the expected format."
So what is going on here?Avatar by linklele!
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2022-07-29, 02:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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- Birmingham, AL
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2022-07-29, 04:23 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2012
Re: Setting Up A Custom Avatar
Oh sorry I didn't see that. Thanks!
Avatar by linklele!