[Suggestion] Remove the expired premium avatar resize.

[Punk Hazard]

Believe it or not, this thread is not meant to bash any of the mods. I know it probably won't end up this way, but I would like for this thread to avoid becoming juvenile, as it would actually be kind of nice for the mods/admins to actually read and consider these points that I'd like to get across, which can't happen if people cause the thread to be scrapped. Anyways, here are my reasons for why I think the reducing of avatar sizes for users whose premium has expired should be revoked as a policy of the site.

1. "It's unfair to members that are still paying for premium." Not really. Even if their avatar sizes are still premium-sized, normal members who have had their premium expired and keep their premium size avatars isn't unfair at all. For one, they still lose privileges such as being able to close and delete threads, enter invisible mode, post in the unmoderated premium section, edit VMs and change avatars to other premium sized avatars. Now, the last part is where I'd like to place emphasis. Even if we still retain our premium size, we still have a trade-off, which is that it applies only to the premium sized avatar we have right when premium expires. If we want to change it, then we have to have a regular sized avatar. The fact that we must retain that one avatar to keep the premium size until we pay again is more than a fair trade-off for keeping the premium size even without an active premium on our accounts. We sacrifice some of our freedom in changing avas to keep premium sized.

2. "It strains the servers." I'm almost certain this was one of the reasons given to us as to why the premium size is reduced. Now, I truly do not mean to disrespect any of the staff with this claim, but I know of no other, less brash way to say it: I believe this is nonsense and it's about money. If every premium member were to pay consecutively, all the time, to renew premium for the rest of our time here, would you claim it would strain the servers? Would you refuse our money and say "No, sustaining premium sizes for this long strains the server"? No, you wouldn't, as people like Kami-sama and -Esdeath- constantly have premium without the mods or admins being concerned as to the "strain" they put on the server. So doesn't it seem a bit odd that it's only when the member isn't supplying money that the server is "strained"? Now, I'm not very computer-Interwebs savvy, but I'm almost certain the server can't use money as a crutch, now can it?

3. We'll make a trade. I've noticed that even though our avatars are resized when our premium expires, our sigs remain untouched. When my premium ran out, I was still permitted my two images in my sig until I had tried to edit it, which promptly resulted in me being told I'm only allowed one image. Now, my proposition here is that we have the option to trade this perk to get back our premium sized avatars. Upon expiration, we'll be notified by a staff member, probably an Admin, on whether we want to keep our multi-image sig, or premium sized avatar.

Now, I don't think this is unreasonable if I do say so myself. I just hope those of you staff at least consider this suggestion.

 

[Avani]

Mod have no say in it at all as these decisions are made by admins alone. If you have any concerns regarding this please contact the admins directly. Though they have already addressed the issue amply and you are likely to receive the same reply again.

You are already required to go back to normal signature size as well. :|

Edit: I will link admins this thread so that if there is any new development making them change their decision, they would let you know.

 

[Zise]

The sooner you get used to it the better off you are. We had our reasons to fix the avatars. And I've explained it soon about a 100 times. It's not only one reason but many. First of all, premium subscription is a subscription. Do you know any other place where you get to keep the privileges after the subscription have ended? So it was never meant to be like it was. The second is that our servers have not been able to take the excessive load, you could probably notice that yesterday still about the whole day, and we did remove the moods first it was a quite bad made plugin for large communities, as it loaded each mood everytime anyone refreshed the page, and this put a strain to the server due to so many doing it, keep in mind that those are just 1kb each. Avatars that are hosted on our server also have to load, and when many people do refresh ofc it's gonna slow down our server too, and a difference of 20KB is quite a lot considering an average of 2000 users something are actively browsing the site. So we are still working on making the servers able to handle this load, we have ordered more new hardware again and we are switching some software in the servers aswell that seems to handle the load a lot better.

Either way, we are gonna keep it this way. So you will have to adjust already. And be grateful that you for so long as you did got to keep a perk that you were not supposed to have in the first place when you weren't a premium or contest winner.