Edit; the proposal mentions not profile pics but also posts, sorry didn’t notice that. I don’t really see why we should support removing animation from gifs in posts. It’s directly messing with and modifying content posted by another user - and personally I find that something that shouldn’t be done on the app side.
hm, if what Jason says is true I find it a bad idea to mix those two features in one proposal:
- allow animated GIF avatars (which I disdain)
- allow animated GIFs in user posts (which is fine for me)
Jason, you’re right. GIFs in posts are user-content. But Diaspora is a viewer to this content and I as a user I would expect that I can define what contents I am viewing and probably even how. The #nsfw tag is legally the same. I can define if I want to see #nsfw contents all the time or only if I click on them. This could be a nice blueprint for the logic to display animated GIFs.
The NSFW tag isn’t really modifying the way the post is shown - it isn’t shown at all until the user clicks. If animated gifs are flattened according to user settings, it could change the whole post.
Maybe a minor issue, but then I don’t really have a problem with animated gifs in posts. In avatars to be honest I might even turn the block setting on myself - if it was enabled and animated gifs were officially allowed in profile images.
But yeah, maybe these should be two proposals…
If animated gifs are flattened according to user settings, it could change the whole post.
I don’t mind that - it’s what happens for me in Firefox in any case. What I absolutely would mind if it were possible for people to upload animations (either in avatars or posts) which it were not possible for me to disable by default.
Just a thought: I’ve just remembered that Makrio allows the posting of GIF animations, but these are displayed as a still image with a ‘GIF’ logo and a play button overlaid. See https://makr.io/front_page
Would it be possible to see if the code they have written to achieve this (which seems to work well) could be ported to Diaspora? Hopefully this would be a case where this would work.
I’ve just added a couple of weeks to the closing date of the proposal I started, in response to requests.
I checked the makr.io code, and for me, it seems that they’ve simply provided each gif with a non-moving screenshot. From page source for example I got this and this picture. The non-moving images are provided with an attribute; “has_gif”, and in this way the prevent the animations from showing instantly. Wouldn’t recommend it for diaspora, for the happiness of the servers’ sake.
@seantilleycommunitymanager At least it works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, I made a quick test and it looks just fine! Don’t know if the canvas makes the site load slower as it has to do some image processing, but if the differences aren’t that big it could totally be possible to implement this feature! 
@ivangabrielmorn Actually, this solution looks like a really good treatment for animated gifs in the stream. I’m not sure whether it would be best to put a play button on user avatars, though.
No play buttons please - if we want to restrict please lets make it configurable for users. Not everyone hates animated gifs you know. I love them
@jasonrobinson I love them too, at least some of them! Didn’t you see that I chose such a cool one when I tested the code to place them within a positive context? 
And of course I think this should be an option, not the one-and-only default!
@seantilleycommunitymanager Haha, naah. But maybe a little pause button that stops all instances of the profile image when clicked and that only appears when the user hovers over the image?
Perhaps animated avatars could be set to play once, rather than repeatedly, unless clicked on?
If the proposal to the right’s outcome is positive (allow GIFs and provide option to disable), this way of changing the default seems logical and easy-to-understand to me: http://docs.babillage.org/diaspora/option.jpg
Do you agree?
@goob But if the avatar is down the stream, you wouldn’t see it animate at all. 
I still hold that for animated avatars video should be used. Then you can control when it plays and how (with JavaScript). For gifs such control is non existent. It surely should be optional in a flexible way. I.e. without going deeply in some settings, there should be a trigger switch in the UI somewhere, which will dynamically enable / disable animation for those who care.
One can give user a way to upload several avatars for fallback (to cover lacking codecs support). Those who don’t care to support all codecs / browsers will upload just 1 video avatar and one static avatar or static can be generated automatically from the first frame if it wasn’t provided by the user.
It would make me really happy if other networks like Facebook and Twitter stole this idea/code from us and made opt-in GIFs available on their apps…
Actually I’d really like the option to set default to hide any post containing an animated GIF, because I’m heartily sick of them and I can’t think of any circumstances under which I’d be interested in viewing one.
I like the mockup from @ivangabrielmorn - Since there are really only two options though (animate / don’t animate) I think we could make it simpler by using a checkbox as opposed to a drop-down.
So a prettier version of something like:
[ ] Animate gif avatars
[ ] Animate gif posts