Topic: Avatars: "Image Placeholder"?

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

I just noticed that my avatar, as well as a lot of other avatars in comments under posts (but not everyone's avatars), aren't properly displaying, only showing a blank white image with the black text "Image Placeholder". Even after manually resetting my avatar, it's still only showing the placeholder. Is this a recent bug on the site that others are experiencing? My internet connection is working perfectly fine, so I don't think it's on my end.
(Edit: for example, this is what it looks like for me)

I haven't noticed this bug myself, I only see "Image Placeholder" when the page is loading. What browser are you using, can you replicate it on a different web browser?

pankino2002 said:
I haven't noticed this bug myself, I only see "Image Placeholder" when the page is loading. What browser are you using, can you replicate it on a different web browser?

I normally use FireFox, but I tried on Edge and it's doing the same thing

deltaflame said:
I just noticed that my avatar, as well as a lot of other avatars in comments under posts (but not everyone's avatars), aren't properly displaying, only showing a blank white image with the black text "Image Placeholder". Even after manually resetting my avatar, it's still only showing the placeholder. Is this a recent bug on the site that others are experiencing? My internet connection is working perfectly fine, so I don't think it's on my end.
(Edit: for example, this is what it looks like for me)

In the post you mentioned, (post #613638), all the avatar images after the fourth comment have the placeholder image for me.
I've noticed a similar if not the same problem on post #536958, only on the 21st comment.
I'll note that checking post #1623511, which has 737 comments, all of the thumbnails loaded.

mc_joe said:
In the post you mentioned, (post #613638), all the avatar images after the fourth comment have the placeholder image for me.
I've noticed a similar if not the same problem on post #536958, only on the 21st comment.
I'll note that checking post #1623511, which has 737 comments, all of the thumbnails loaded.

Same for me (Firefox for Android). I don't use a blacklist. I don't see much rhyme or reason for this, unless it's related to hidden comments?

mc_joe said:
In the post you mentioned, (post #613638), all the avatar images after the fourth comment have the placeholder image for me.

It appears to be caused by the user ZekromXReshiram1134 having an invalid value set as an avatar.
The script handling thumbnail loading does not know what to do with it, so it just quits.

That is not possible these days – the site checks whether your avatar is actually a valid post. But it's possible that they haven't touched their profile since before that was implemented.
I'll fix it in the next patch.

For those curious how this happened:
user #160505 user #166839 user #192873

<div class="post-thumb placeholder" id="tp-3579592" data-id="3579592"><img class="thumb-img placeholder" src="/images/thumb-preview.png" height="150" width="150"></div>   </div>
<div class="post-thumb placeholder" id="tp-0" data-id="0"><img class="thumb-img placeholder" src="/images/thumb-preview.png" height="150" width="150"></div>
<div class="post-thumb placeholder" id="tp-0" data-id="0"><img class="thumb-img placeholder" src="/images/thumb-preview.png" height="150" width="150"></div>

One of these is not like the others!

It begs the question how the heck they manually set it to 0 (or what site bug set it for them). It feels like the sort of transient bug that only existed for a short while where it was using 0 instead of null (as in, deleting it), and only now someone noticed the side-effects that lingered. By comparison, this randomly chosen user has no avatar and the entire 'profile-avatar' div is white space.

For what it's worth, for me, all the avatars show up on post #613638.

Updated

alphamule said:
For what it's worth, for me, all the avatars show up on post #613638.

Just so we are clear here, a patch was deployed yesterday that fixed the more obvious issue – that being the script just giving up if it encountered a thumbnail that it didn't have any data for.
The issue with some users having their avatar post ID being set to 0 instead of null persists, but it's not as pressing, so I will address it in a future patch.

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