Maybe if a lot of people hate animated gifs as avatars Ryan can provide a mechanism to freeze them to thier first frame (controled by the profile settings). This is better than having to click on them ech time, plus some avatars are nice the movement makes them annoying (again for some, maybe a minority, but quite a few peole raised this concern).

This of course is more work for Ryan, storing a static image 9first frame of all animated avatars + logic to use one or the other version of the avatar (everywhere game table, forum, news, stats) based on logged in user preferences.

Thanks for your consideration.

PS: The banner ads on the left side, are sometimes animated too! At least they bring money, I hope. Ryan did you noticed that? Google might not allow their ads to sit on the same page with flashing ads, but now that the GWT is open source you might not need to care.