And I agree with Tut. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
If something is overdone, like always repeating animated gif's, it loses its effect, and when it loses its effect then it is just distracting, random noise with neither meaning nor purpose. I think that static images are much more effective because they capture a certain emotion in one single snapshot of a particular pose.
Besides, animated gifs like avatars are often too big: I've seen that one of the animated dragons in this forum (don't remember which) weighted in at 40kb. Another such gif is about 76kb - just for one avatar! Think of the poor modem users.. IMO ~8kb should be an upper limit for images of these dimensions (80x80 pixels if I'm not mistaken, although I'd prefer a limit of 64x64 here as well, but that's irrelevant right now and too late anyway).
Back to animated gif's. In all honesty, Xena, I found your eyes much more enigmatic when they didn't flash at all. The look alone was passionate, whereas now it's sort of.. well, flashy. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
This actually goes for the other animated avatars too. They just get boring after a while...
Meow...Arhu
