[TECK]

no, the avatar will be displayed also the postbit. the idea hiding them is to prevent other users to use the journalist avatars.
but they will work the same way like regular avatars. it's kind of a private avatar section for your staff only. the staff will have their predefined avatars that they select (the best way is to use pictures, it looks cool... look at sitepoint website). the rest of users can upload their custom avatars the usual way.

i did it this way to save a big JOIN, since the "default avatar" table will be alot smaller then the "custom avatar" one. the result will be a faster search onto the database, since the default table will have only few id's, instead of 10,000 for example, in the custom one.

also, if you disable the uploads, your custom avatars will not work, but the default ones, will.

btw, your no. of queries looks good now.