Avatar Modification - Profile

[BigJon]

Hello!
[NOTE TO MODS/ADMIN - I MEANT TO POST THIS IN vB4 Programming Discussions - SORRY!]

I have been working on a mod for the vBulletin forum I'm a member of so that members may 'ignore' (hide) the avatar of another user if they choose to for whatever reason. Hiding it replaces it with a stock image that is set in the options of the mod. It works perfectly fine in postbit_display but I have been trying to expand it to the user profile and/or the activity stream with no luck. I've only been working behind the scenes of vBulletin for a few weeks and my php knowledge is limited so I apologize ahead of time if I'm asking the wrong/stupid questions.

I have two questions;

First is can anybody tell me why the following doesn't work? I've tried multiple combinations but I can not get the second condition to validate. If I rewrite it and use actual numbers (ie; 1,2,3) it works fine. The data stored in my custom column is comma separated.
hookname: userprofile_create

PHP Code:

if ($this->registry->options['mymodenabled']){
            if (in_array($this->prepared['userid'], explode(",",$vbulletin->userinfo['custom_column'])))
            {
            $this->prepared['avatarurl'] = 'images/avatars/default_ig.png';
}} 


For the above, I've tried using a less permanent

PHP Code:

$this->prepared['avatarurl'] = $vbulletin->options['mymod_url'] 


but it doesn't seem to like that (I use in postbit_display_complete just fine)

Second is does anybody know how to do something similar to the avatar thumbnails that are in various other places in vBulletin? (Blogs, activity stream, etc) My main goal here was to block avatars in threads and I accomplished that but I would like to extend this everywhere else.

I searched vB.org for a mod that does this and found nothing. If one exists already and I missed it please point it out, otherwise when I am finished polishing and it's working correctly I will post it here (if I am able)

Thank you for your time.
-Jon