I had a look at this, but it doesn't look like it is possible to do this as a plugin. I changed it around a little bit and got it working on 3.65. Then I noticed that there were some problems with it - namely that if you had 100 avatars in a category and 50 were already in use then it would select 150 records, but only display 100, repeating the same avatars over and over.

So I made some adjustments to the version I was making so that instead of being displayed with "taken" the used avatars are simply omitted from the list entirely (incorporating the suggestions made by others earlier in this thread).

I also removed the ability to turn this hack on or off on a per user basis - it simply applies to all users on the system now.

Even though this is a thread about a mod which only worked on 3.0, I've attached the version that works on 3.6 to this post. Since I'm not the author of this mod I can't really provide any support for it - sorry.

If you've used the original version of this mod, or you've used my modified version prior to this date you should be aware that there is a performance issue. If the query is used on a busy or large system it can tie up the mysql process on the server, affecting all other queries. Therefore you need to ensure that you execute this sql query on your database:

ALTER TABLE `user` ADD INDEX(`avatarid`)

By adding this index it cut the query time on my server from over 15 seconds to 0.0065 seconds.

I've updated the attached file in the previous post to incorporate this change.

If you are using this mod and you do not add the index as described above you could affect not only the performance of your own forum, but also other applications / sites which run on the same server.

If you have been using the modified version of the original mod I made above (1.1), you should know that I've made a full port of this to 3.6.x and released it as a version which uses the plug-in system.

If you'd like to use this new version then you should first remove any changes made manually to files or templates before installing the new mod.

You can find the newly released mod here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=148711