Hello all! While making my standard profile pic a bit more festive this year, I noticed that this site converted the first frame of the GIF into a JPEG image and used that as my profile pic. Is this now something that happens as a result of trying to save space on the website or is this just a temporary glitch? @Nadeox1
We did not change anything to that. Note that GIFs have some size limit. IIRC it's 1 or 2MB. It may reject yours without an actual error message.
As I said, we did not remove or touched that possibility. You can still use GIFs as avatar, as far they are below the size/dimensions limt (which are also still the same). The thing is that the uploader does not give you a warning for those two things, and will just silently reject your GIF if it exceedes the limits.
I think the limit for gifs might be lower than the limit for other image formats. I have a 200x200 version of my current dancing doge avatar which is 77.8 KB (< 1 MB) and yet it will not animate.