Hello Everyone,
Ahhhhhh yes that "dreaded" man and woman default silhouette that as site owners we really don't like. Well in the final end we are LEADERS first of our site and it is up to us to shape, mold, guide and help change behaviors of our members by being proactive (help to change it) not (re-active, ie oh my another member has forgotten or overlooked the opportunity to change the avatar during sign-up) and then you try to chase the member to ask him or her to please upload an avatar image. We all know that this can take a "lifetime" to accomplish especially if you have a very popular website.
Here is my solution that I would like to share with all of your because in the final end it does not matter if it was a man or a women who by passed or overlooked the opportunity to change their avatar and now your member block looks like silhouette bomb hit it. This suggestion will help ALERT them to the fact that their avatar does not look like the other avatars where members actually upload a photo or image thus helping to reduce the grey silhouette pollution..............LOL On my site I change the silhouettes to an image that reads "NO AVATAR SELECTED" it is the same image for both men and women members (we can always check for how many we have of each sex in our admin panel).........This way when the member logs in they will see that they did not select an avatar.......and they will either ask questions about how to do it (which I have in a knowledgebase Q&A area of my site, or they will just figure it out and do it themselves. I mean let's face it, the truth is nobody likes to be different from the community or look like an oddball...........lol
I have attached the image to this post, and have also provided the link below to the image (it is already sized to the 64x64 pixels) for everyone to use if you like my "proactive" idea.....To see it in action you can take a look at my website at: http://www.socialpuzzlecommunity.com
image located here: http://www.socialpuzzlecommunity.com/images/noavatarselected01.gif
You will be replacing the man_medium.gif and the woman_medium.gif in your:
/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/images/icons folder Make sure you rename the "noavatarselected01.gif" to the above image names. What I did was renamed each of the above with a "BAK" extension.
Thank you and I hope this helps.......
Kind Regards,
Jeff
