MAP Forum

To me, this is an accessibility issue. Avatars give a quick visual representation that a new person is speaking. Without an avatar, it's just walls of text with inadequate separation between posts. It requires more mental effort to read through and follow conversations.

Good point.

We took a deliberately cautious approach to the use of any images on the forum with the intention of easing those restrictions over time if we felt it was possible to.

Given the kinds of people that have registered so far and the kinds of discussion present, it's probably safe to enable avatars. We'll have a chat about how to go about it, though. It only takes one person using an illegal image to do a lot of damage.

(I also moved this topic to the "Improving Mu" forum.)

You could do avatars the way VoA does it, where they can only be added by an administrator.

Specifically, VoA has a dedicated subforum for uploading images. Users can create a new thread, uploading the images they wish to use for avatar and sig, or elsewhere on the forum. After a user makes the post, it is only visible to admins and moderators, who then handle the request.

Our tech support will be looking at the possibility of avatar uploads in the next week.

This should help avoid the perception of a wall of text and improve readability/user retention.

We allowed gallery avatar and a 300x300 max avatar for confirmed registered users (5+ posts).

Feedback on the feature welcome.