I decided to play with animated avatars on Dolphin 7.0.9. I already knew that the uploader for avatars would not save the animated gif out correctly, stripping out the animation by converting the gif into a jpeg. However, I decided to see if the avatar module itself would allow me to place an animated gif as my avatar. I created a 64x64 and a 32x32 animated gif for testing. I ftp these files with the appropriate file names into the avatar file repository. I went to my database and inserted the file name of the 64x64 (the 32x32 is pulled out by Dolphin; the $filename . "i" thingy) into the database assigning them to my user ID. I went to my avatar and the avatar was listed but shown as a grey box only. The avatar module won't read the file with a gif extension. Seeing that the files must have a jpg extension I ftp into the repository and changed the extensions to .jpg. Going back to my avatar section of my profile, the animated gif was now showing and playing. Evidently the extension of the file is ignored and the information is pulled from the header of the file instead. Tested on Opera, Firefox, and IE 9.