Avatar help

[Wargamer]

Right, so, the avatar I'm using at the moment is a .gif file of a ninja fox thingy.

Problem is, I uploaded the wrong one, and I want to change it. However, if I load up ANY .gif avatar, be it from my hard drive or from an external source (Photobucket) my Avatar doesn't change. It does change if I upload a .jpeg.

Anyone got any idea why this is happening, and how to fix it?

 

[Wargamer]

Ah, nevermind; after fifteen minutes of trying to work out what was going wrong, mashing the F5 button seems to have done it.

Any passing mods, please lock this.

 

[Entharion]

I can explain this.. the temporary data that was stored on your hard disk was the old picture, once you refresh the page a new one is downloaded, this is to prevent the server from overloading due to large streams of data continuously being reloaded and reloaded.

 

[Virgil]

It also takes a minute for your avatar to completely update after it's uploaded. In addition to your browser caching the image, we also sync avatars (and other images) to a server that we use only for images every minute or so. It helps cut our bandwidth costs and keeps our main web servers from wasting time on images when they could be sending out pages faster.

 

[Wargamer]

Yeah, I saw the bit about it taking a minute... but this was quarter of an hour, and it was odd because changing to a static image was near instantaneous. >.<