[Natch]

If you wanted to look it up in the php.net manual, you would have found the following information (the following is my paraphrase):

Basically, you need to output the image either directly to the page (leave out the path statement) or to a file... or it is being created by ImageCreateFromGIF(), modified with ImageTTF(), then it vanishes after you create it when the page finishes loading...

Unless you know what the transparent colour using in the image is (and you can't detect that on the fly) your output image will not be transparent...

The following code would work for your "stored as a file" avatars, but for the database stored avatars you would require a database INSERT query to put the modified GIF image into the DB...

PHP Code:

imagegif($preava,"./$vboptions[avatarurl]/avatar{$userid}_{$avatarinfo[avatarrevision]}.gif"); 


Make sense?

Another way to do it would be to create a separat PHP script to create the image itself, then you can call a banned_img.php script if you are viewing a banned users avatar... that might suit better.

Ref: php.net - imagegif()