Just uploaded my avatar that I used over at CL and realized that it turned it into a static image. This is not a major concern, but I am just wondering if there are any plans for avatars to support animated GIFs?
This is doable. We need the ImageMagick PECL Extension installed to have animated avatars, but at the same time, I'm not sure if it's in the best interest to have animated avatars. Too many can be a little distracting, and I know it can cause some issues with slower connections. I'll bring this up with Barnstable though and see what he thinks.
Update: I had my hosting company upload Imagick PECL extension onto the server to enable animated avatars. When this was done, the site went down and was down for somewhere from a half hour to an hour apparently because a glitch in Imagick stressed the CPU. SO we turned it off and wanted to test it out outside of the site. Thk has been testing it, and it works, but the only problem is that it would have to load the large avatars from the profile rather than the ones on the actual page. This would mean a lot more data being pulled from the server to load, and I'm more concerned with keeping the site fast than animated avatars. We will keep looking for answers to adding animated avatars, but that's where we're at for the moment.
Animated Avatars are now working!!! If you already have an Avatar that was supposed to be animated, you will have to just re-upload the gif image, and it should work now.
