I just saw something on another web site that I thought would be great and pretty easy to implement in a future version of Invision Board.

On this web site: http://typophile.com/node/28658 you can see that the "Who's Online" is a grid of miniature avatars instead of the list of names that IPB currently uses. It would be great to have this option in the next version.

It's kinda cool, I guess, but that sort of thing will always be a mod instead of built-in, IMHO.

Thing is a lot of people don't use avatars... and how does it work if people have avatars turned off?

Me worries about bandwidth and the delay in getting the script to re-size them to a small size ^_^

Plus as Zigzag has a very good point, some people do not have avatars ;)


I think it would make a nice mod though for those who wanted it as Rick has said. :)

Waiting for a re-size shouldn't be an issue. The forum software can create a thumbnail when a user updates their avatar. It could even use just one file for this, overwriting it when changes are made so there would only be one tiny additional avatar file for each user instead of a growing library of mini avatars.

People without an avatar could still be displayed as text along with the avatar blocks, either in-line or after or before. A simple drop-down box in the settings could offer:

Who's Online List

• Do not display
• Text only
• Avatars only
• All
• All with text first
• All with avatars first
  

I'm one of those people who won't use non-IPB add-ins, so I hope that Invision decides to support this minor change.

-1
more bw
more cpu force
more slowly forum

Would probably be nice. I honestly so rarely even use that area though. I wonder how many even ever view it.

edit: nevermind, I thought you meant the online lists you get to by clicking last click, for example. If you mean the bottom of the index page, that would get cluttered on busy sites, I would assume though.