Generate profile photos

[Sheffielder]

Sorted - just need to wait for the existing ones to flush through
I'll turn it back on once sorted by IPB

[David..]

Yeah, the letter avatars is nice. But it can be quite resource intensive for the browser so a solution would be good. 

Especially now that Google will take into consideration the site speed when displaying search results.

[MMXII]

I was wondering why profile photos of guests don't get a letter (based on the chosen guest name)? It looks weird to see a mix of letter and non-letter profiel photos. Or is there a setting to turn on letter profile photos for guests, too?

[bfarber]

16 hours ago, MMXII said:

I was wondering why profile photos of guests don't get a letter (based on the chosen guest name)? It looks weird to see a mix of letter and non-letter profiel photos. Or is there a setting to turn on letter profile photos for guests, too?

Because image files are generated and mapped as the user's profile photo presently, letter photos are unavailable for guests.

[SeNioR-]

Okay, but does anyone know how to rebulid / delete default letter avatars? the point is to change their size to a smaller one. Maybe someone will write a simple function?

[MMXII]

18 hours ago, bfarber said:

Because image files are generated and mapped as the user's profile photo presently, letter photos are unavailable for guests.

Hm... I've seen a forum software of at least one competitor that uses letter avatars for guests, too. I am not too familiar with the technical aspect of IPS4, but I assume this should also be possible here? Of course this is no "must have", but I think it would be a nice addition to make the feature itself more complete. I really like the letter avatars.

[Adlago]

Displaying an avatar with a letter and color is a good idea, but think realization is bad - too many and large images that delay the loading site.

I had an idea - avatars without images

What do I think about this?

- The first letter is saved in a text format in the avatar area.

- Background color for avatar area is generated, for example, from the decimal code 'joined' from the core_members table. The last 6 digits converted to a hexadecimal code are used. And this is an individual background avatar.

There are no images, but there is an avatar with a letter.
What do developers think - is this possible?

[opentype]

If one is concerned about the loading speed, once can just turn the letter avatars off. No one is forcing you to use them. 

Doing it without images is possible, but it leads to all sort of new problems. 

[Adlago]

55 minutes ago, opentype said:

Doing it without images is possible, but it leads to all sort of new problems. 

Would you please show some of these possible problems? Thanks

[MMXII]

Does anybody know how this is done in XF (XenForo) or WCS (WoltLab Community Suite)? Whenever I browse sites that use these software, it feels like there is no delay at all.

[aia]

5 hours ago, MMXII said:

Does anybody know how this is done in XF (XenForo) or WCS (WoltLab Community Suite)? Whenever I browse sites that use these software, it feels like there is no delay at all.

In XenForo they use CSS + HTML instead of images. It's the best way to do this kind of things. E.g.:

Avatar taken from index page of this forums sized 8 kb:

Exactly the same thing done with CSS + HTML sized less than 0.2 kb and can be much lower because most part of it will be moved to one CSS class (everything except color), so in result it will sized about 0.05 KB.

M

[ABGenc]

On 16.02.2018 at 4:46 AM, SeNioR- said:

Okay, but does anyone know how to rebulid / delete default letter avatars? the point is to change their size to a smaller one. Maybe someone will write a simple function?

Thats is what I am wondering too. May be @bfarber can help

[asigno]

On 2/16/2018 at 12:46 PM, SeNioR- said:

Okay, but does anyone know how to rebulid / delete default letter avatars? the point is to change their size to a smaller one. Maybe someone will write a simple function?

Was there an easy way of doing this?

[Condoweb]

I confirm that it is possible to go to avatr svg without problems. We did it. As for the regeneration of new avatars, taking advantage of the new settings, just run this query
update `core_members` set` pp_main_photo` = NULL, `pp_photo_type` = NULL where` pp_thumb_photo` is null

But eye that the old avatar remain in the servant and then you will have a lot of useless images .... Otherwise, you have to download all the folders with the avatar and use an automatic resizing software ...

[aia]

Exactly the same problem with profile backgrounds. They also can be recreated via CSS with a HUGE saving in size, bandwidth and loading time. For example, default background of user which posted above weights 735 KB. It's more than whole code and other resources of this page altogether. Too big waste of disc space and traffic.

[Joy Rex]

I think IPS should implement a solution where the default letter avatar is generating an .SVG file - smaller, looks good on HiDPI (aka "Retina") displays, and is dynamic - user changes their username (if allowed), the letter avatar can be regenerated.

Or perhaps write an inline SVG at page render time? Should be easy to take the first letter of the User name, choose a random hex value for the background colour and generate the object.

The ultimate would be to allow the user to customize the colour (and perhaps the shape - why only circles - why not polygons, squares, etc.) via their User CP...

[Fast Lane!]

Bump....  This certainly slows sites down (bid sites for sure).

[rfcontreras]

On 9/30/2018 at 9:57 PM, Fast Lane! said:

Bump....  This certainly slows sites down (bid sites for sure).

True. 

[SeNioR-]

@bfarber Any news in this matter? 😞 Plz do default avatar based on CSS in IPS 4.4

[Day_]

Just seen this topic having turned them on for the first time a couple of days ago.

Not looked at any of those pagespeed sites as I gave up chasing those magical A+ ratings, my eyes say they haven’t noticed any difference in speed/loading times nor have I had any complaints, moans, mentions of any kind that the site is slower.

If they can be done better, great, but could it be that those test how fast your site goes thingys can have a placebo effect when it comes to fine margins such as 10 point losses?

[Day_]

12 minutes ago, dayh said:

Just seen this topic having turned them on for the first time a couple of days ago.

Not looked at any of those pagespeed sites as I gave up chasing those magical A+ ratings, my eyes say they haven’t noticed any difference in speed/loading times nor have I had any complaints, moans, mentions of any kind that the site is slower.

If they can be done better, great, but could it be that those test how fast your site goes thingys can have a placebo effect when it comes to fine margins such as 10 point losses?

For what it’s worth, I risked the curiosity as I’m not a cat.

I have 7 boards on the homepage, 4 of which had generated profile pictures.

On the topic page it was roughly a 50/50 split between generated profile photos and uploaded.

I did cheat by turning Adblock on as Google Pagespeed does not like Google Adsense. Go figure. 

Turns out, I get the magical A

Adblock off 

[Adlago]

31 minutes ago, dayh said:

Just seen this topic having turned them on for the first time a couple of days ago.

Not looked at any of those pagespeed sites as I gave up chasing those magical A+ ratings, my eyes say they haven’t noticed any difference in speed/loading times nor have I had any complaints, moans, mentions of any kind that the site is slower.

If they can be done better, great, but could it be that those test how fast your site goes thingys can have a placebo effect when it comes to fine margins such as 10 point losses?

Take a look - there are only 2 letters avatars in your home page right now. Loading speed is relatively good.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdcfcfans.uk%2F&tab=desktop

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dcfcfans.uk/qMsnwNKB

But when there is more than 5 avatar with the letters, speed loading your site sharply falls. See a test on your forum page.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdcfcfans.uk%2Fforum%2F4-derby-county-forum%2F&tab=mobile

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dcfcfans.uk/RJvETOsg

See what image is loaded for each avatar with letters. 500 x 500 pixels.

Example:

Your page uses a 34x34 pixel resized image. This resizing that a browser does to show an avatar image creates a delay in loading your site

 

[Day_]

20 minutes ago, Adlago said:

Take a look - there are only 2 letters avatars in your home page right now. Loading speed is relatively good.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdcfcfans.uk%2F&tab=desktop

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dcfcfans.uk/qMsnwNKB

But when there is more than 5 avatar with the letters, speed loading your site sharply falls. See a test on your forum page.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdcfcfans.uk%2Fforum%2F4-derby-county-forum%2F&tab=mobile

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dcfcfans.uk/RJvETOsg

See what image is loaded for each avatar with letters. 500 x 500 pixels.

Example:

Your page uses a 34x34 pixel resized image. This resizing that a browser does to show an avatar image creates a delay in loading your site

 

Take a look? I'm on there most of the day and night, too long my other half says which with 49,767 posts she may have a point. It does not and has not sharply fallen at all.

I know you are on a life mission of achieving 100/100 across every analysis site going, but I seriously think there is a placebo effect taking place here.

Try a different test, one day turn generated profile pictures off, the next have them on and then ask the users of the site if they noticed any difference. 

[Adlago]

12 minutes ago, dayh said:

Take a look? I'm on there most of the day and night, too long my other half says which with 49,767 posts she may have a point. It does not and has not sharply fallen at all.

I know you are on a life mission of achieving 100/100 across every analysis site going, but I seriously think there is a placebo effect taking place here.

Try a different test, one day turn generated profile pictures off, the next have them on and then ask the users of the site if they noticed any difference.  

I know a lot of ways to eliminate this effect. And you are in your right to pay attention not to this. Thank you for the comments.

[opentype]

52 minutes ago, dayh said:

I know you are on a life mission of achieving 100/100 across every analysis site going, but I seriously think there is a placebo effect taking place here.

I agree. Optimization is useful, obsession about speed test results is pointless. The typical argument is, that it is supposedly so crucial for search ranking. And while it is not completely irrelevant, the weight of this aspect is much smaller than people claim. As an example: I have a competitor site, which was essentially abandoned. It was never converted to SSL and since it is technically broken, many pages don’t work at all or the have first byte times of over 8 seconds(!) for every page. If it would be true, that these aspects mean significant search ranking punishments, this site’s search performance should be catastrophic. But that is not what happens actually. 

And when it comes to the actual performance for users (not test services), it’s more about how the page is rendered. If the page rendering doesn’t start because certain images need to be loaded first, that can be a problem. But if the rendering can be started since the image dimensions are properly declared, then loading dozens of avatar images while the user is already reading the text for example isn’t a big deal.