A Very Quick Word on Avatars

I love 'em. I'll go into more detail about these nifty pictures that accompany your posts in future blogs. For now all I'm going to say is if you get to the point you have an av or two (or twenty--no kidding some chatters collect avatars like Imelda Marcos collected shoes), be very careful what site you choose to host them. Read the terms of service. Because some sites are very specific about not hosting anything that might remotely resemble pornography. I like to think my avs are pretty tame, representing pinups or art photos rather than porn shots, however the kindly folks at Photobucket.com do not agree with me and deleted my entire collection of avatars today. I wish I could say I had no idea that could happen but I did hear about the possibility from other chatters and just hadn't found another site yet. And the loss of Photobucket as my host site would have been little more than an irritation except that their simple editing tools on the site had allowed me to make a whole bunch of avatars that, in another example of my laziness, I hadn't saved anywhere else. So I spent about 5 hours this evening researching new host sites, recreating avatars (in a shiny new Photobucket account), saving the new avs to my computer and finally uploading them to a new host site. If I like the site I'll share the name with you later. But at least I won't have to chat naked. Updated Monday 3/8 I don't like the site. They lied and said they allow linking to outside sites but only a crappy little square cropped thumbnail. Ugh. So I'm still on the lookout. Going to talk to some friends on my site and find out what they used. Probably would've been the easiest way to go in the first place. *sigh*