Yes. One for each image and I have not bottlenecked it against load.

Not sure what you are saying but I am using myself on my MBA Forum without any such thing for PMs.

Not sure how else we could fetch the avatars because adding a join to the avatar table with threads/posts table is much more costlier operation for large forums anyway.

I'm not liking how each avatar size is different, depending on the user's avatar. Can we make it so that they're all one fixed size?

Yeah query wise it is intensive.. though I have xenforo and haven't seen how they must have reduced it. I'm know for sure XF does not have too many queries.. pretty optimized.

Looks great, but my forums seems to be all piled...

Anything?

This would mean distortion of image.

To make it the same as XenForo you need to add a image-crop tool:
http://keithics.com/blog/jquery/ajax...-php-crop-tool
http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/02/be...o-use-for.html

If you add that, then all avatars will show as equal dimensions, without distortion.

That would mean we have to add jQuery as well and vBulletin does not use jQuery and s I have no plans to add it.

vbulletin has this directory for jquery: clientscript/jquery/

vbulletin is moving away from YUI and implementing jquery more and more. They intent to drop YUI completely.

thanks works fine