Animated avatar

[Carole]

I tried to upload an animated avatar and it failed with 'file may be corrupt'. Do you not support animated avatars?

[kpzoo]

If it's an animated GIF you should be OK, I think. If it *is* a GIF and it says the file may be corrupt... well, the file may be corrupt. ;-)

If it's some other format like SWF, I don't think that'll work, because I think they only accept GIF & JPEG and maybe PNG, but I could be wrong - maybe someone else can confirm? Couldn't find this in the FAQ.

[Jacquilynne]

Nope, we don't.

-- Jacquilynne, Community Manager for Chowhound

[kpzoo]

The server can tell the difference between an animated GIF and a static GIF? That's really interesting - didn't actually know that was possible!

[Jacquilynne]

I'm not sure if it's something we do deliberately but our server takes the images and compresses them to different sizes and shapes for the places they appear, and I imagine it's that code that fails to deal with the animation.

Avatars were meant to be small, unobtrusive visual indicators -- allowing animated ones would make the people who already don't like them really unhappy.