Make a user's avatar invisible

[Zzed]

We have had problems on our site with certain users who use offensive
avatars. We realized that it is a waste of our time fighting with them
over it. So I made this hack to make a user's avatar invisible to the
rest of the members. The user himself will see things as usual. The
mods and the admins will see the user avatar as well but in the thread
view screen there will be a red writing below the avatar that says:

Avatar Offender

I have also provided links in the admin CP to turn this option on or
off and another link in the find users that allows you to locate users
with offensive avatars.

Tables affected: user
Templates affected: none
Files affected: avatar.php, showthread.php, admin/user.php

The instructions are pretty simple. It should take no more than 10 minutes to istall this.

Note: If you have already installed this hack, please download the text file again and revise the showthread.php modifications. Sorry about the inconvenience. :(

[Chris M]

LMAO!!

I know who this Hack is perfect for at our forums...

:tup:

Satan

[Zzed]

Ok now, share the wealth and Email me that offensive avatar. :D

edwink@seebeyond.com

BTW, let me know how you like the hack. :)

[Floris]

I like the hack but ..
if a user on my forum refuses to remove the avatar (or change it) then I just remove it through the admin control panel.
If he still sets it back, he will get banned. Simple as that.
No offensive stuff on the forum, not willing to listen? Then you can go.. I think this hack is not really needed. (in my case; and i think in many others) But I can be wrong :)
Very nice work on the hack though.

[Zzed]

Thanks for the compliment. :)

We used to do the same thing where we would remove the user's avatar, and would ban the user if he did it again. There are a few boards out there, some of which are allies and others are in competition with us. A banned user usually tends to start bad mouthing us which ends up costing us users.

We found this to be the best way to handle this. In fact more than half the avatar offenders have switched to non offensive avatars on their own. ;)

[Floris]

If a user is also a member on another board, and he rants yours there, and therefor users from your board unregister, because they support him. Then you might just be happy they are parting too. Probably saves you future problems.

[TECK]

excellent hack Ed. unfortunatelly i plan not to use avatars on my site...

[Chris M]

/me thinks he wont be signing up at nakkid's site if that is the case...

Satan

[Chris M]

I was just wondering...

Is there any way that this could be adapted for a Signature also?

Satan

[Zzed]

I can make another hack for this if you are interested.

[Ren]

Thank's Zzed for this nice hack ;) I would be intrested in the signature hack also if you have time to do that.

[Bald Bouncer]

anyway you can just stop a certain user from seeing the offensive avatar, most of our members dont mind but there may be the odd one that takes offence :D

[Zzed]

Don't you just hate people like that? :D There is always one person that gets offended by everything. :D

That would require a different hack.

[heretic]

Actualy all I do is make another usergroup and set permissions to where they can't modify their profile. I call it a "profile lock"

[Ren]

If I have one person complain about another's avatar I just tell them to goto the user cp and "Show user's avatar in their posts?" set it to NO
same can be done with signatures and attachments .