[Update Required/Bug] Changing avatar

[Darwin473]

Hello all,

 

I've just changed my avatar and it was a bit of a hoop jumping exercise. I set my original avatar with a photo from my phone via the app. My experience may vary from others, but here is what happened to me from my laptop:

 

When I went to my profile here to update it, it kept coming back with an error and tried to take me to the home page. The error was "an error has occurred" with no other information.

 

Then I went and had a look in the avatar testing and instructions thread to see what I was doing wrong. The instructions on the first post seem to be out of date and require updating. Unless I've gone seriously mission-blind (entirely possible) but none of the instructions listed on that first post matched up with the available options on the site today. Not a huge surprise considering that it's from 2007 and as far as I can tell, hasn't been edited since (mods might have an "edit without flagging as edited" option though). I had a look through a bunch of pages starting from the end to see if there was a newer set of instructions - if it was there, I didn't see it.

 

I went back to my profile and updated the cover photo (yay!) but no matter what combination of format or image size I tried, I couldn't update the avatar. Despite there being an "update your avatar" option listed, along with some size guides.

 

Finally, I emailed the new avatar to myself and updated it via the app on my phone. Worked perfectly, straight away - and was then visible on the website via my laptop browser. Not sure if anybody else has encountered any issues updating their avatar via a browser, but if the system is fine and it's just me, I think it's still a good idea for the first post in the avatar thread to be updated. Or at least marked "correct as of August 2020" if it's right and I was doing it wrong.