Personal Photo VS Avatar

[Jonathan G]

I have an observation after converting from SMF to IPB. As you might know, SMF doesn't have a "Personal Photo" feature; however IPB uses this feature quite prominently. Upon converting, I have noticed that I have 50,000 profiles with the following:



Obviously without a personal photo to convert, the converter can't do anything about it, but it might be nice to have the option to disable the personal photo feature, and utilize the avatar feature instead.

Thoughts on this? Or any suggestions on combating this default photo problem? :)

[bfarber]

You might like to search this forum for some similar topics. There are some good discussions surrounding the same suggestion you've just made.

[bobbank]

Our community just migrated from vBulletin, and we share the same feedback.

I suggest the developers give us more input over how the Profile Photo is used. To my mind, a profile photo is just that - something that you see when you visit the user's profile. We control access so that only recognized members of our community have access to profiles; therefore the comfort level with including personal photo's is higher.

The purpose of an Avatar is to tag your posts with an icon that you have chosen to represent yourself, yes? Why then does IPB only use the avatar for forum posts, and not for comments, conversations, or status updates? To me this is not logical and also not appropriate for communities that consider personal photographs to be something more private.

So, my suggestions are to consider:

1. Giving the explicit option to the Admin to decide where the avatar is used, vs. where the photo is used. -OR-
2. Simply give the option to turn "off" profile photo's from appearing anyplace other than on the profile.