Once upon a time, the Codex didn't allow you to have custom avatars, you had to choose from a gallery which was full of images from various RPGs and tactical games. This is because that custom avatar you wanted to use is stupid. And ugly.

Then we upgraded to XenForo, and as that didn't have a built-in gallery feature, people used custom avatars for a time. And yay, avatars became stupid and ugly.

Earlier this year however, we paid someone to build a gallery system for us because DU has not yet into OOP and XenForo code is foreign and strange to him. Also lack of time.

We didn't remove old custom avatars at the time though, because we wanted to make sure the gallery was working properly. In the end, apart from some issues with GIF avatars (hence we've removed all GIF avatars from the gallery), everything seems to be working well. So the time has come to remove those custom avatars.

However because of the way XenForo stores avatars (which is as a physical file based on your user id stashed under the data directory), there's no way to tell who has old custom avatars and who's already using an image from the gallery - without going through them one by one. So in the tradition of the Codex - in order to remove all old custom avatars - we just purged everything.

That's why you've lost your avatar today.

Those who had custom avatars as a result of some agreement (IE: Codexian troll avatars drawn by MCA during one of our fundraiser campaigns) will have them re-instated. I've gone through and re-added most of them for those users. If there's anyone I've missed, let me know.

Otherwise, please feel free to peruse our gallery and choose an avatar that you feel suits you best. One day we may allow you to pay for a custom avatar because we're sell-outs like that. But that's one day, not today.