View avatars directly from user webspace

[DKasemier]

To reduce use of harddisk space and the amount of moved data I'd like to have a hack which does the following thing:

People have to give up an URL for there avatar where the picture IS, so most of the time that will be a link to there own server space.. the avatar has to be loaded from that place, so it doesn't goes to the webserver..
i already made a custom user template for the avatar, and i used that in combination with an <img href="$customfield5" height="60" width="60" border="1"!> or something like that
but when someone doesnt fills in an avatar, you get a red cross, now how do i avoid THAT!

[mjames]

By doing this, you're basically asking for broken images galore. Plus, this would create a problem for some users who don't have their own webspace or don't want to go to the trouble of getting some. If the avatars are taking too much space on your server, you can reduce the maximum file size of them or get rid of them altogether.

[Robert Basil]

Not only the above problem with this hack. But also think about the users who have their avatars on slow servers. The avatars do not have height or width tags included when they are shown, and since they are shown inside of a table the whole table full of message will wait to load for one slow avatar.

[DKasemier]

Originally posted by mjames
By doing this, you're basically asking for broken images galore. Plus, this would create a problem for some users who don't have their own webspace or don't want to go to the trouble of getting some. If the avatars are taking too much space on your server, you can reduce the maximum file size of them or get rid of them altogether.

blah blah blah, good and well i know the biggest forum in Holland which uses this system on their own server, if people use slow webspace we ask them to put it on a faster server, if people have broken images, they notice it