Avatar Upload Format

[Aedilred]

I've attempted to upload a new custom avatar. The url starts with a "http://" and ends with ".png" as indicated in the field description. It is also within the size limits and although it is a long url it fits within the character field. However every time I try to save it I get the following message:

You did not enter the correct format for the Custom Avatar URL field. Please read the field description for the expected format.

I can't see what I'm doing wrong. I attempted to shorten the url using tinyurl but that lost the .png suffix (I added such a suffix and the forum accepted it despite its not being a valid link, but obviously then would not display the avatar). Shrinking everything in the url but the filename and adding that back on manually results in the same error message as otherwise.

Anyone who could advise me, I'd be grateful.

[Rawhide]

The URL you have for the avatar redirects to the below address, which I assume was the address you were trying to use.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y287/athelassan/Empire/b8518fca-cbf8-4a04-85e2-cab1a3a9c25a_zpscgr1foj1.png

Try renaming the picture to remove all hyphens (-) and underscores (_).

[Aedilred]

It seems Photobucket adds character strings as a security measure (and on any images edited using Photobucket itself) but by turning that off I was able to lose the underscores and hyphens, but it still broke. I removed the space (%20) as well and now that seems to work. Seems like it might be Photobucket's fault though rather than the forum's, then; it seems on previous uploads it's compressed spaces rather than added additional characters, which is why previous avatars with names formatted the same way have worked and this one has failed, which is rather annoying especially since there's no convenient way to edit the filenames on Photobucket directly that I can find.

Thanks for the pointer.

Edit: Although now that I check, my previous avatar did have an underscore in the file name too, and I never had a problem with displaying that, so is that something new?

[Brother Oni]

Incidentally, I haven't played cricket since I was in school and certainly not left handed, but isn't your avatar well off his wicket and is just asking to be bowled or stumped?

[Aedilred]

Incidentally, I haven't played cricket since I was in school and certainly not left handed, but isn't your avatar well off his wicket and is just asking to be bowled or stumped?

No need to worry; he's most likely just hit it for four

[draeath]

I've found that unregistered users trying to go directly to a photobucket image without a referral parameter or cookie are redirected to a gallery page featuring the image.

It's very likely this is tripping up the verification, as when the server tries it will receive HTML instead of an image. This also means it probably wouldn't work for other users anyway, because they wouldn't get image data when that URL was loaded.

[Rawhide]

I've found that unregistered users trying to go directly to a photobucket image without a referral parameter or cookie are redirected to a gallery page featuring the image.

It's very likely this is tripping up the verification, as when the server tries it will receive HTML instead of an image. This also means it probably wouldn't work for other users anyway, because they wouldn't get image data when that URL was loaded.

The server doesn't actually try to download the image, it does not connect to (in this case) Photobucket at all. All the server does when you set up the avatar in settings, is verify that you have put only valid html to an image file, it doesn't check if that image file exists.