Avatar issues

[Mike_S]

Does anyone else have problems trying to change avatars. I can change to a standard site avatar... Star Wars, Guitar Icon, etc, but it won't work if i try to upload a small jpeg or gif from my computer!

Mike

[64Guitars]

I just tried it on a test account and it worked okay. What sort of problem are you having?

To review the procedure, here's what I did:

1) Went to my profile page and selected "Forum Profile Information" from the menu at the left. The resulting page looks like this:



2) Clicked the "Choose File" button to the right of the heading "I will upload my own picture:" and navigated through the file selection dialog to the folder on my computer containing the picture I want to upload. I then selected that picture (the one I chose is called "guts1.png") and clicked the "Open" button in the file selection dialog. At this point, the screen looks like this:



3) Then I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked the "Change profile" button to make the changes permanent. The screen then looked like this:



That's it. Avatar changed.

There is one thing to be aware of. Because of caching in your web browser and possibly on the server too, you might not see your new avatar when you browse your messages because the browser is still getting the old avatar from the cache. So clear your browser's cache, then reload the page and your new avatar should appear.

The following Wikipedia page has instructions for both bypassing and clearing the cache in many popular browsers. Bypassing will probably work, but clearing definitely will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bypass_your_cache


If you still don't have any luck, please give me more details about what's happening compared to what I described above. I believe others have had problems uploading avatars too and I'd like to get to the bottom of it. I suspect that people are in fact successfully changing their avatar but because of caching they don't see the result they expected so they assume it failed, then they try changing it to something else like a standard icon of a guitar, Star Wars, SuperHeroes, etc. But I could be wrong about that. Maybe it's something to do with the format or size of the picture they're trying to upload. The one I chose in the example above was a 100x100 pixel, RGB colour PNG file. Other types should work too. If they don't, I'd like to know about it so I can look into it further and try to fix it.

[Hilary]

I've had trouble in the past and depending what device you are viewing from it can take a while to change - but from memory showed up the next day.

[Mike_S]

So here is what happens... exactly the same as you for steps 1 and 2. but on step 3 my screen doesn't not look like your screen, ie. I don't get a little picture of my avatar embedded alongside the "I will upload my own picture" checkbox. Instead it changes to the attached...

I have tried a variety of files - all small, none bigger than 100 x 100 pixels. All RGB. I have tried gif, jpeg and png, but no luck!

It did used to work (very sporadically) but no luck in the last 8 months or even year or more.

Appreciate your help 64

[64Guitars]

Thanks for the screenshot. That helps a lot. I'll look into this soon, possibly tonight.

[64Guitars]

I've made some improvements to the code. You should find that avatar uploading is much more reliable now.

Give it a try.

[Mike_S]

Just tested 64... that's working great now!!

Many thanks for the support, really appreciate it!!

Mike