Yup, that's the thing.
When you check someone's profile you're supposed to see his avatar, and it works for (I suppose) all avatars from the galleries, but for some reason it doesn't work for people with unique avatars, making their profiles avatarless.
What's up with that? Can it be fixed?

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

I think the real question here is "does it really matter?"

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There are things in this world that I dislike. One of the things I dislike the most is a serious argument, well constructed, delivered by someone who makes themselves difficult to respect.

Thank you, Philes.
Exactly what I was thinking.
I was just too busy playing catch-up after being gone for 6 days to post it.

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"There comes a time when you look into the mirror, and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be.
Then you accept it, or you kill yourself.
Or you stop looking into mirrors."
--Londo Mollari

And to think I refused to write "Yes, I do care" at the end of that post, even though I was pretty sure that will be the reaction. The explaination is hard to be made without it sounding stupid, but I'll give it a go anyway.

1. As Philes stated recently, he (and quite a lot of other people) associate people with their avatars. For those who are just getting to know the forum and it's members it may be somewhat a bad thing that, as an example, they won't realise how one of the top posters, a guy named Xento, is the same guy as the faceless dude who posted here and there. The member list becomes much less useful when the first x posters lack their identities.

2. It's a flaw in the forum design. How minor it wouldn't be, it keeps the forum from being perfect. It's quite possible that only I'm such a perfectionist to be bothered with that reason, though. Also, let's combine this with the first reason. The problem is here for years (yet it didn't ever bother me enough to write about it), and it was here when I arrived. And when I did, I liked to lurk and view profiles of members, and usually the first one which crop out are top posters - here, the unique avatar possesing ones. First I thought that none of the top posters aren't active anymore, since all of the active ones had avatars. After a short time I realised that actually people having avatars don't have them in their profiles and for a long time though that avatars in profiles don't work at all and thought "Wow, this forum seems to be quite buggy". The impression was needless to occur. Also it made it slower for me to associate some posters (remembered by avatars) with their names and forum age (remembered via member list), like in the Xento example, so it propably makes it harder for newcomers as well.

3. Curiousness. I wonder what causes those avatars to not be shown. I wonder if it's a big technical issue or a small glitch which however didn't bother any admin enough to ever make him do anything about it.

We all care about meaningless petty issues that no one else gives a crap about. This one seems to be just one of mine.

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

That's because they're not really avatars, they're special ranks. When somebody gets a unique avatar/rank, they remove the actual avatar, that's why you see nothing in the profile, as rank images aren't displayed in profiles in phpbb2.

Also, the forum is far from perfect, the software is really old.

Well that sound logical. It doesn't solve the problem, but at least shows what is it's nature. Quite a sly way to give unique avatars, by the way.

Shouldn't however one between having his avatar removed and being given a rank avatar have the option to chose an avatar disabled? I assume that now it doesn't work that way, seeing how friend_al_23 has two avatars at the same time. Unless he's a exception just by mistake.

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Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

friend_al_23 is the exception which proves the rule.

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That's just stupid. If you found an exception to i.e. gravity, you'd disprove the whole rule, and we'd need to make a new rule.

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