Looking a little like a transit map… 
It seems mine is not balanced enough and fell over
EDIT: got it back up
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shoulda fisheyed it
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note, there has been a mountain of discussion on meta about this: https://meta.discourse.org/t/round-avatars-in-topic-list/27098
bottom line is that there is a simple change @stevebaer can make if the new default is not working for the community.
I kind of like it; seems less cluttered for some reason.
Now if you can only get the Jeff fisheye style implemented:)
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Yeah it works really well in the topic list, as avatars get bigger it has more chances of not looking right.
Based on my avatar, I may have to change my screen name to “Man in the moon” 
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I will just summarize some of the “against” comments from upper mentioned discussion on meta.discourse.org, which show why implementing this feature (in this excluding way), is a bad thing:
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By cutting corners you are also cutting significant parts of the users avatars.
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Rounding assumes that focal point of a user’s avatar is somewhere near the center, which may not be the case. Perfect example of this is Willem’s avatar. This further means that you have to additionally allow users to center their avatar, not only crop it automatically.
All of this has been nicely stated in abarker’s reply. @sam says that he is not willing to add any image cropper options. This is an issue, then. -
Maybe this is not the case at main meta.discourse.org forum, but some designers and architects in here, use their official company logo as their avatar. Not sure if the ones with rectangular logo will be satisfied with some important part of their avatar being cropped.
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You are forcing some of us (who do not like this feature) to scale down our avatars in order to make them squared again. This may make some avatars less easy to distinguish.
Just a few comments on some reasons for implementing this round avatars feature:
Indeed it can be debated infinitely, that’s why application of this “science data” is questionable. Is @awesomerobot trying to say, that discouse forum users might get more distracted with user’s avatars when reading topics with square avatars in comparison with round ones? Because mentioned science paper says that:
Sam, as you are programmer, this is like saying to a C# programmer: “You need to switch to Python, because you do not have to explicitly declare variables, and code is much cleaner”.
Upper sentence may be true, as the “science” paper too, but theory is one thing, and the way our brains work is completely another. For example, for me personally, round avatars are much more disturbing, and distract my attention much more than square ones.
On a basis of this we can indefinitely discuss whether or not category buttons should be round(ed) or not; whether starting reply information box should be rounded an so on…
[quote=discourse]I think it’s a couple factors:
- Rounded edges give a bit more “breathing room” around the images when there are avatars close together like that.
- Rounded edges feel a bit more organic and human. When we’re talking about avatars of people, human is good.
- Rounding these images sets them apart from the many other square elements of our default design a bit more (buttons, nav, etc)[/quote]
These are @discourse 's person opinions of course. Some users may agree with this, some don’t. Upper mentioned issues are much more important that a feel of a “breathing room” or making parts of the forum more organic.
My conclusion: With this change you are imposing one way to all other users.
As you can see there are some of us who do not find it useful, even so, find it disturbing. So I am not saying to remove this feature, but rather allow the other non-liking-it group to have an option of not using it (simply added to the users profile). In this way, I would totally support it.
Personally, I really don’t care one way or another, I just thought the change was unexpected and had some funny results. I’m partially used to being round anyway, if you log in on a Mac that’s a multiple user computer, the user profile avatars are also round. And if you’re a child of the 50’s “beat generation” like I am, you do not want to be “square”…
–Mitch
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willem’s avatar looks good like that
(imo)
My previous avatar was all to the left; I added some shading to ‘buttonize’ it.
Bob’s still is too much to the left being cropped: 
-Willem
for comparison, sketchup’s discourse is set to use squares still:
it looks as if their ‘last posted’ function is working a bit better than here… (last poster in the thread has a blue glow around their avatar)… it’s only working on a handful of threads at this forum… or maybe here, it only glows if the last poster isn’t the last avatar in the series?
The avatar thing is a bit of a storm-in-a-tea-cup. At the end of the day the way avatars are displayed is a site operators call, in this case @stevebaer gets to choose.
It is super trivial to move back to square for example: http://discourse.mcneel.com/?preview-style=e301120a-6688-431c-9196-349b68c9cc67 … to enable this back here all that needs to be done is for an admin (aka Steve) to click the “enable” button.
Personally, I think round avatars are a good default for new sites because it looks much better on the topic list.
@jeff_hammond will reply to that here User avatar highlighted only if topic starter was last to write in topic
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This solves the issue then. Thank you.
I like how you’ve used the shadow to create a pin badge look, Willem.
Perhaps that could be an option?
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