Good News! Forum Avatar Support moving to Mobile Nations Passport

[James Falconer]

Some pretty sweet news for us today. Avatars are now supported by Mobile Nations Passport! This replaces the previous method of uploading your avatar via the forums. Now you can upload your avatar in one spot (your Passport account page) and it will show up on ALL Mobile Nations sites where you participate. It's one avatar to rule them all!

Some key things you should know:

- To access this new feature, simply click on the cogwheel at the top right hand corner of the site when logged in, and then click on 'Your Account'. Click your avatar, and ALL of your existing avatars are available in a gallery.

- If you have tied your account to single sign-ons (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc.), you'll also find these avatars in your gallery! + Gravatar too!

- From there, you can select a different avatar or even re-crop existing ones. If you don't like any of the avatars you have in your account, you can also upload a new avatar.

- We can accept avatars up to 500x500 pixels.

- If you had multiple avatars, we've picked one of your avatars to use as your new default avatar. It has been cropped to 100x100 pixels as well. If you had a larger avatar, it may be cropped! You can easily recrop or change the avatar under Your Account.

This is a cleaner, more robust system than we had before. Even if you only participate in one forum, you're going to want to give this a look.

We're also rolling out avatar integration into the blog comments as well (it's already supported on AndroidCentral, iMore and WPCentral), so do take a few moments to 'spiffy' up your avatar.

Note to Tapatalk users: You can continue to upload avatars via Tapatalk - they will get uploaded seamlessly to your passport profile page.

That's it for now folks, let me know what you think!

 

[skoenig]

Ok so the issue there is that your avatar is a rectangular image whereas we support square aspect images and you want the whole image. Nothing uncommon there.

When you upload an image you can select an area up to 500 x 500 from within the image but the image needs to be 500 x in order to select the whole area... bit of a catch 22 there.

The solution was to grab your avatar and add enough white top and bottom for it be square or squarish. Image apps often call this enlarging the canvas. We can't do that easily because we don't conveniently know what color to use for the larger areas...at least not in this revision.

In this case I did it for you using the excellent freeware tool XnView.

Hope this helps.

~Steph

ps. The next planned revision to the avatar tool is to include pan and zoom tools.

 

[skoenig]

Happy to help...

Quite right that's probably going to be a common scenario which for now can only be solved by making the original image squarer.

I've got a good interim solution though which I'll talk through with the team.

Yes there will be a way to remove avatars in the near future.

~ Steph

 

[winmod21]

Hi Steph,

Thanks for your helpful reply on the other thread. Any chance of having animated or active avatars in the future? My current avatar is actually an active pic with the Satellites going around the planet, but when I uploaded the pic (I also tried dragging & dropping), it of course loses it's animation.

 

[James Falconer]

winmod21,

I believe all avatars are saved as jpg files at the moment, so you're right, no animated gif action allowed right now

We'll keep this in mind for the future though, thanks!