[deleted] it sounds good, but I don't think I make any video out of it.
The reason it's not implemented into Flarum is because GIFs are notoriously hard to work with.
Flarum avatars are resized to a small square. This allows us to accept (almost) any size of picture and just shrink+crop it as needed. The same library can't resize GIFs while preserving the animation. To do the same as non-animated avatars for animated avatars, another library must be found or created. As far as I know, there's no obvious answer. There's many tricks, but they might or might not work on all servers.
Removing limits and just implementing direct upload of the GIF to the server could to lead to all kinds of storage, bandwidth and performance issue on production servers. I wouldn't want to release such an extension publicly, as anyone installing it without being aware could face issues.
With any solution skipping resize, there's still the problem of square avatars. If the GIF isn't square and we don't crop it, there could be all kinds of UI issues.
Because it's already possible to manually add GIF avatars without too much trouble, I wouldn't take time to implement that as an admin-only feature either.
If you know of a PHP library to resize GIFs, I could make a video about using that library in Flarum. But I don't know of any library of the kind.
Or, if GIFs must be chosen from a third-party service (like the GIF menu in Discord for example), maybe there's a way to request GIFs in a known dimension upon selection. It quickly grows into a more complex extension if a GIF picker must be implemented, but it could be interesting.
