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Avatars: A Proposed Solution
StoreTags: greasemonkey, avatar, avatard, hack
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People who enjoyed reading this: owl, energygiant, mlbot, monty, cbit, frnortnr, utofbu, quicks, Roshi, airliner, adcBicycle
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I know a lot of us miss avatars, myself included. They added a lot of enjoyment to the site. So I thought of a workaround.
When I was going to sleep last night, this came to me. Let me preface this by saying that I have never used greasemonkey, whether for running other people's scripts or for writing my own, so perhaps this was written prematurely, but I would like to get the gears turning on this issue again.
Ingredients:
-greasemonkey script.
AND(
(
-a ftp server on which to host the avatars
-some system where users can have a password for uploading or something
)
OR
-a centralized list that points to filenames on other servers (probably slower)
)
Again, I haven't used greasemonkey so I don't know the particulars, but wouldn't it be a matter of (similar to the P___L - banning script):
METHOD 1:
-getting the username from a post
-instead of blocking the post, insert an img src tag based on username
METHOD 2:
-getting the username from a post
-loading the list of references to images, and choosing an image based on username
-insert an img src tag for that image
It seems like this could be done in greasemonkey...right?
I guess I'll look into this on my own.
Some of the advantages of this option are:
-we don't whine to Bogdan for anything
-people who don't care about avatards can just skip on downloading the script
-we don't have to be restricted by the original file size, format limitations (though they are pretty good and we should probably stick to them or something similar)
Disadvantages:
-slower than if avatards were integrated into the site again
-managing the uploading of files would be more tricky
-is going to take up some bandwidth on someone's server
What do you guys think? I think I'd be willing to learn greasemonkey if no one else is interested, and as I'm more confident in my PHP/MySQL skills, I'd probably be willing to offer up some webspace and make a simple interface for uploading. | |
Comments
06/27/07
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owl
i'm for that! i got here after avatars. when did they go?
06/27/07
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ricemutt
that sounds fun... do it!! myself, I never had an avatar, i'm too lazy.
06/27/07
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mlbot
OMG thats rad. Conscript cbit and roshi.
06/27/07
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monty
if u build it they will cum
06/27/07
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Roshi
I think it might hammer the server that hosts the avatars. Cbit's count comments script does do a lot of requests (and would be a natural starting point for the avatar code), but the fact that this script will run on a number of em411 pages may increase the traffic considerably.
Any thoughts, cbit?
06/27/07
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Roshi
Other issues: you will need to make some sort of registration/upload link on the server for people to register avatars.
06/27/07
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license
Roshi: right, I think I would be willing to host that part on my server. I'm using godaddy and they're not real heavy duty, but I think just registration shouldn't be too taxing.
06/27/07
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cbit
definately feasable. give it a go. I do think that loading speed will be an issue when browsing the site though.. i also don't know how/if image caching will work if the pics are being grabbed by a greasemonkey javascript, so that could also be a potential bottleneck if it turns out that the images are reloaded every time, instead of being read from the users browser cache when available.
06/27/07
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cbit
2nd thoughts: i don't see why caching shouldnt work as normal even if the src's are being set by javascript.. so once the initial loading is done, it might work at a respectable speed (?)
06/27/07
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mlbot
Ascii avatars
06/27/07
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Roshi
What if...no, that wouldn't help. (I was thinking if you could have the script do only one request per page, but I don't think that really helps).
The simplest method would to have each post do an individual request like cbit's script. Of course, if you can prevent duplicate requests, that will cut down a lot (especially where there is jdg/mlbot/astroid wankfest).
06/27/07
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Roshi
Actually, if you just had a regular naming convention you could just have the javascript transform the html and add an image tag.
For example, say you were hosting everything at http:/poonet.org/images/
Just add javascript to transform
mlbot
to
mlbot <img src="http:/poonet.org/images/mlbot.png></img>
apologies for malformed html.
06/27/07
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Roshi
Is that too simple?
My ideas for webprogramming are usually kind of stupid.
06/27/07
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quicks
I had this same thought a while ago. What I was thinking was just have some kind of table, which I guess would correlate people's nicks with a list of urls. The avatars could be hosted anywhere, including photobucket or imageshack, or even to a livejournal avatar/etc. I'm not sure if the table could be hosted and referenced from another site, or if it would need to be stored in the greasemonkey script (and people would have to update it) like the blacklist script does.
06/27/07
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mlbot
hmmm. what happens when poowel and his buds start using pornographic avatars as a joke?
Just thinkin' ahead.
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