UBB.Developers Forums UBB.classic V6.4 - 6.7 Modifications V6 Mod Ideas Avatar Enchancements

It's nice to have them in there but the layout is pretty appalling.

What if all your avatars are not the same size? As the tags are forced to make them the same width you lose definition.

I took out the height and width settings on public_display_profile.pl and change the select avatar page. I also re-arranged the table to try and make it look a little better but I've got a feeling I'll be back later to do some more prettifying work on it.

My avatar issue isn't the same as PM's.

How can I make sure my members CANNOT DIRECT LINK to graphics outside of my site?

I abhor the idea of direct linking. With my community quickly approaching more than 2000 in number, there is no way that I can monitor all of the avatars.

I liked the avatar hack from previous UBBs; I'm not a big fan of the avatar feature with the 6.3, but I was ready to come to terms with it--until I saw one of my mods direct linking her avatar to another site at our test board. If she can do it, others can, too.

Could someone please create a hack that would prevent members from direct linking their avatars to an outside site?

I'd very much appreciate it.

I modified the avatar placement and also took away the members rights to use custom ones. I have a thread for titles and avatars and I modify the images myself and every couple days go into the CP and assign the avatars for them. It's a little more work but well worth the effort.

Paulus Magnus: The avatars are set up that way so users can select huge custom avatars which will screw up the layout of your threads. You don't want someone with a 500 pixel avatar do you? It should be very easy to modify the code to allow any size avatars if you want though. Actually, in 6.3 I think you can change the setting in the control panel to have it not force avatar sizes.

Ok, I know what he is talking about here. Stoping custom avatars will not solve this problem because all someone has to do it right click an image, view properties and there is the path. I doubt a hack can be designed to stop this because its more of a .htaccess issue. The correct term for this is called "Hot linking".

Using .htaccess, you can disallow hot linking on your server, so those attempting to link to an image on your site, for example, is shown either the door (a broken image), or the lion's mouth (another image of your choice, such as a "Barbara Streisand" picture- no emails please). There is just one small catch- unlike the rest of the .htaccess functionalities, disabling hot linking also requires that your server supports mod_rewrite. Inquire your web host regarding this.

With all the pieces in place, here's how to disable hot linking of images on your site. Simply add the below code to your .htaccess file, and upload the file either to your root directory, or a particular subdirectory to localize the effect to just one section of your site:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
Be sure to replace "mydomain.com" with your own. The above code causes a broken image to be displayed when its hot linked.
If you're feeling bitter, you can set things up so an alternate image is displayed in place of the hot linked one. The code for this is:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/nasty.gif [R,L]
Same deal- replace mydomain.com with your own, plus nasty.gif.