Is Your Avatar Not Appearing After Uploading It?

If you've gone through the process of uploading your avatar/picture in your Forum Profile Information, and it's not showing up, this is normal.

To fix the problem, hit ctrl + F5 on your keyboard. This will refresh your cache.

When you load a page, your browser will save files on that page to your hard disk. Included in these files are images. Instead of loading the files from the website again, it will load it from your hard disk. The reason you can't see your avatar change after uploading it is because your browser is loading your previously cached avatar, instead of your new one. By refreshing your cache, you'll be getting updated images.

If for whatever reason ctrl + F5 doesn't work, Google how to delete cache for your browser.

I alternate between filetypes fr my avatars, so right now I'm using a PNG avatar, my next one will be JPG etc =o

Also, any decent browser should follow the Cache-Control HTTP header which is sent from avatars.rmrk.net, which has a max-age value of 258400, meaning every 3 days your browser should update its cached version =o

can i ask why? :O

Why what =o

By default SMF serves avatars dynamically through the main index.php (it runs like the attachment system, gets the request for the avatar, goes through the database to find it, serves it to you). Instead I made RMRK serve avatars as images, just like they actually are, for lower resource usage.

Browsers would normally cache them for alot longer, so that extra http header form avatars.rmrk.net makes sure they update at least every 3 days. Even still, avatars.rmrk.net uses about 10-15GB of bandwidth per month, pretty impressive for just 105x150 images =o

Why do you swap PNGs and JPGs every other avatar?

EDIT
Good topic. I remember the first time my browser did this to me, annyong.

So people don't have to refresh their cache to see his avatar change, duh.

So people don't have to refresh their cache to see his avatar change, duh.

d'oh. I see.