Another gripe is, the forum software in general really needs to adopt a "generic icon" for users with no avatar. I think it's pretty clear we've voted against that. :)
oh my bad, i didn't read carefully, thought you're having problem with vanillicon's avatar loading on a slow internet connection. please ignore my previous comment.
you may want to check this plugin out... http://www.goodoldmemories.com/2011/11/wavatar-plugin-for-vanilla-2-0-18/ the avatar images are generated and cached in your your server.
I only have 4 '200 OK' requests: 1) The actual HTML document 2) A subsequent AJAX request 3) Another AJAX request 4) Google Analytics The rest are 304 Not Modified, and one 302 from Facebook for someone's avatar. Perhaps your browser is configured wrongly and isn't caching.
They seem to really interfere with page load across this forum, seemingly.. you are firing off a ping for each icon that needs to be displayed, but these are being done sequentially.. meaning if there are 20 users on the site.. it appears there isnt any cache control over page refresh, so each time i refresh say the…