Avatar visibility
I actually think that avatars would be nice to have. Obviously, as pointed out above, there are a few things to consider.
A special page (or some other mechanism) for privileged users to allow removing other users' avatars would be helpful; or then we could do it how wikiHow does. Once an avatar is uploaded, an admin has to approve it before it is shown. SocialProfile extension handles the avatar system by providing an upload page, Special:UploadAvatar, to upload avatars and an avatar removal page, Special:RemoveAvatar, for privileged users to remove others' avatars.
Which brings me to the next point...how would avatars be stored? As normal files? SocialProfile stores them separately in $wgUploadPath/avatars/ and they are not treated as normal wiki files (i.e. they don't have a File: page and so on).
Also, it would be useful to have a user preference to enable/disable the displaying of avatar images. This way people who don't want to see avatars wouldn't have to, but those who want to see them would be able to.
Maybe avatars could be simply stored in some .js user subpage (to avoid reinventing the wheel), or the same approach could be adopted: .css/.js subpages are editable by the user and by sysops. Avatars should obviously be free images, on WMF wikis, since they can't be allowed by any EDP. Best solution: don't develop avatars ourselves (we're not interested in them), let Wikia do that. :-)
It would be great if LiquidThreads could use the SocialProfile Avatars if both extensions are installed... both extensions address a more social feeling and a personalized Wiki - so they should work together!
