it's not quite as much of a problem as it was around launch when everyone was going wild, but we know it's obnoxious (even dangerous, for some folks) to get a faceful of animated GIFs when you're not expecting it; so now, animated GIFs attached to a post start paused by default. if you want GIFs to auto-play without interaction, you can also go to your user settings page and disable this behavior site-wide.
caveats
- for right now, this only affects animated GIFs included as attachments on posts. expect changes to follow soon for pausing GIFs you include inline with
, header images, and avatars, after we figure out some small details. - there's no good way on our end to tell whether an image you're uploading is animated or not yet, so we use "is this image a GIF" as a cheat. as a result:
- there's a few animated PNGs and motion JPEGs attached to various posts that won't be paused yet.
- we treat still GIFs like they're animated, so if you dig up like an old 88x31 browser button from geocities, it'll have a play/pause button that looks like it does nothing.
- because of how CSS animations work, they can't be paused using this same technique, so we can't commit to a timeline for pausing those by default -- some CSS animation posters are in the habit of using content warnings to hide them behind a click-through, and we appreciate that.
