When I first had to move an SMF board I had problems with corrupted avatars and attachments using ftp. Also SMF posts recommended putting avatars in a custom folder as png files as one of the ways to increase performance. Easy to find these posts.
It seems using a custom folder of png files for avatars means they do not show on the board view or MessageIndex. Its strange... just this morning I installed the new mod over there to do this - it failed too.
hmm... something sounds broken somewhere.
I noticed something similar in 1.1 (tracked at https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/issues/2441 ), it could be the same.
To investigate!
I just posted over at you know where:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=544924.0
The first thing suggested in the SMF wiki to improve performance:
http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Performance_enhancements
One of my personal goal for a future release (likely 2.0) is to completely get rid of avatars-as-attachments and go only with the uploading to a dedicated directory (that could very well be a "special" one under avatars).
That will make things much, much, much easier in many cases. nods
I know this works on ElkArte as all sites I've setup use the separate avatar directory (to avoid the db lookup overhead).
If you start with them in the db and move to a separate directory, I think there was a hidden maintenance function you had to run. You can't have a mix of some in the db and some in the directory.
I'd have to look at the importer code to make sure it handles the avatar directory, if not you would only have to copy/ftp files over and make sure you set the avatar directory in the ACP.
That seems an easy fix for me - thanks.