New avatars?

oddjoe wrote:
I don't get it, why do you need to be promoted to show a simple image?

My guess is to prevent things people used to do back in the olden time days when forums/chat rooms weren't as sophisticated.

Forget the name that was used but it's probably to prevent someone from creating a fake account to imposter someone by creating a similar user name and using the same pic. Think it might have been called simply "fake". Does anyone remember?

Flooding also used to happen, where a user would create multiple posts in a short period of time to annoy others and seriously disrupt communication.