[X-Fan]

First, for those who use the Perks hack, you'll need to enable avatar linking for your paying members usergroup. I also enabled it for admins, moderators, and staff for my board:

After you've installed this hack, backup member.php then open it and find:

PHP Code:

if ($bbuserinfo[posts] <= $avatarcustomposts) {
    eval("standarderror(\"".gettemplate("error_avatar_minimumpost")."\");");
} 


Replace with...

PHP Code:

if ($bbuserinfo[usergroupid] <=4 or $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==8) {
    if ($bbuserinfo[posts] <= $avatarcustomposts) {
      eval("standarderror(\"".gettemplate("error_avatar_minimumpost")."\");");
    }
} 


You may have top edit the <=4 and ==8 depending on what number your forums' usergroups are. For mine, 1 is unregistered, 2 is registered, 3 is awaiting email confirmation, 4 are COPPA users (which explains why I did <=4 as it was easier than doing a separate entry for each group), and 8 is for banned users.

What that modified code does is basically checks for any groups that you don't want to let use the avatars as links regardless of their post count. If the user is in one of those groups, then it checks their post count. If the user isn't in one of those groups (ie admins, moderators, staff, etc) then it skips the post count check.

But, this hack isn't working for me. I can get it to accept a URL via the field in edit options, and can see the linked to avatar image by clicking the link on that page and in the admin, but the linked to avatar is not showing up in posts.

In fact, my original avatar was still showing in posts (utilising Kier's custom avatar as file hack). I tried removing that but still the linked to avatar doesn't show up in posts.

I'm assuming that this hack doesn't affect existing avatars, so that when this hack does work and you already have a selected or custom avatar that you'd end up with both showing in posts (if you added $post[avatar2] instead of replacing $post[avatar] with it)?

I tried editing the postbit_avatar2 template ro read...

< img src="$post[avatar2]" border="0" alt="" >

...(without the spaces of course) as I had no idea why a close img tag was included, but still no luck.

Anyone got any idea how to incorporate this with the existing avatars feature so that you can either select an existing avatar, upload one (from harddrive or from a URL), or link to one via a URL?