Ditch the Square: Why Circular Profile Pics Are The Future

Just wait for the Circular Baduk Boards, rather than bowls there are four pockets

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Yes yes. Round board, square stones.

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I remember (perhaps from Martin Gardner) Piet Hein being keen on such superellipses, though I thought I remembered him calling them something else, and preferring some exponent around 2·5.

Rectangular stones pls!

Squircle perhaps?


BTW, I‘ve been using a circular avatar image for a quarter century now :sunglasses:

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Against a black background, I am wondering whether my profile pic aka avatar is circular or square.

Scherm­afbeelding 2024-10-02 om 19.50.03

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Hmm considering submitting a PR for this during Hacktoberfest. Is this actually a popular suggestion or just a meme? (fwiw I really do prefer the circular profile pics)

  • I prefer circles
  • I prefer squares/rectangles
  • I prefer squircle
  • I don’t care
0 voters
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I don’t think that any changes should be made. The current square avatars can be made to simulate circles or other shapes by utilizing transparency.

Putting a circle inside of a square does not lose any available space. However, if it were the other way around, trying to simulate a square avatar (using transparency) within a circular cropped image, then one would lose space.

Thus, currently circular (other shaped) avatars are already supported with a simple workaround. Changing to a circular cropped avatar by default would limit flexibility and options.

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As you can see here, cropping my avatar down to a circle actually clips the outer circles

Yeah that’s fair, glad I asked!

Heh the inconsistency between OGS proper and OGS Forum will continue to bother me :upside_down_face:

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Mostly it’s because discourse does discourse things haha

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We could change it on Discourse.

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It would be useful if default was square, but with a button that instantly crops your avatar to a circle.

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What if there were a user setting that changes how all profile pictures are displayed to that user?

And that would just change how everything’s rendered:

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If that would be the case, then there should also be an option to hide pictures (and/or flags) altogether.

What about people that already use a circular avatar? Would another player toggling their display preference “square their circle”?

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Well the behavior I’d expect would just be that the transparent pixels in the corners of the ‘circular’ avatar would render as transparent, rather than not being rendered at all, so visually, nothing would change.

The only difference would be that clicking on the pixels in the corner would count as clicking on the image, rather than clicking on the page behind the image, but clicking on profile pictures doesn’t do anything on OGS anyway so that doesn’t actually matter.

I guess what i was thinking with this was that the “square” option would just be what we currently have, with all the behaviors as they currently exist, and the “circle” option would be the only thing to cause anything to change

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I don’t think this necessarily follows (though I know the “hide flags” option would be appreciated by some as well)

I like that all the avatars on Discourse are circles, I think it fits well with the clearer aesthetic

Future: objective reality do not exist. Everyone see something different depending on their own settings.

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Sounds like we need a new topic “features that noone wants but will be implemented”. A nice partner for the “features everyone wants…” topic!

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