Alright, my users have struck again with the good ol' "gimmie gimmie," and I want to see if anyone could help me acheive a few goals that our users want,

First off: unique avatars. On our board, people recognise a poster by their avatar, and when a new member signs up and picks the same avatar, all hell breaks loose. Would there be a way to tell the database that an avatar isn't available if someone else is using it already? I have hundreds of avatars, more than enough for each user to have a unique avatar, and still, they happen to pick the same avatars and throw everyone off.

Secondly, something I want: Per-user images in sig. I have an online status indicator that uses images (of course) to indicate AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, and Odigo statuses. I have images disabled in sigs, but html is enabled. Now, as much fun as it is to code insane html using <td background= to set up images (which is what I have been doing) I'd rather just be able to edit a users profile, have an option to give that user the ability to have images in sigs or not, and the number of images they can have in their sig. I'm sure it wouldn't be much harder than adding a new profile field and running a check in showthread, but I dunno.

Anyone think they could come up with some ideas on how to go about this? Any help is greatly appretiated.

wow, ok. $userinfo[signature] works, but it doesn't parse vBcode, or line breaks. Is it possible to do that?