said by Insight6:I would speculate that the reason, and it is just speculation, why DSLR doesn't offer the OPTION of larger avatars is because the forum software or setup either won't permit it or in order to make the change to allow it if possible the software is so old that it would be to big of a project, literally a project, to do so.
Here's a real answer for you...
Avatars here used to be between 40x30 and 40x85 (possibly larger?). The user-info box to the left of posts was standardized for everybody and having a fixed-width worked well for the layout. The avatars could be expanded downward without screwing up the layout so we were allowed a variable height. Eventually that restriction was changed to 40x30 - 40x50 for some reason.
In 2004, the "I See People" feature was implemented. (
see this thread) You do not have access to this since you're not premium. This allows users to create a completely customized user info boxes by using their own html. ALL avatars were resized to 40x40 (and the restrictions for new ones were changed) so that people wouldn't have to worry about odd-sized avatars screwing up their layouts.
In 2005, after years of bitching by members, Justin implemented 50x50 avatars. Every new avatar must be 50x50, but there was still the question of what to do with the grandfathered 40x40 avatars (and also the even-older odd-sized ones). The solution was to keep resizing the tall avatars to 40x40 and display the 40x40 ones at their native res. I seem to recall a short period where everything was resized to 50x50, but that didn't last long. So now there is effectively two possible avatar sizes you can encounter on here, and you have to design your "I See People" settings to work with both sizes. Since it's only 10px, most layouts didn't have any problems with the larger avatars.
That brings us to where we are today. Adding significantly larger avatars would screw up a lot of people's I See People settings. It's difficult to design a good user box that makes effective use of space when you don't know if you'll be seeing a 40x40 or 100x100 avatar. Even if you made the larger size mandatory and just upscaled everything to be consistent, people would still have to redesign their user boxes, which they haven't had to touch for the past seven years.
So your request would be much more reasonable if it weren't for that one site feature.