Hey Pickful community,

This one isn’t a new feature. It’s an apology.

We lost a batch of early uploads, including the avatars of 146 members. Those files are not recoverable. Here’s exactly what happened, what we did about it, and what we need from you.

🔍 What you may have noticed

If you joined early, your avatar may have turned into a broken image icon recently — and as of today, it has reverted to the colored initial avatar built from your username.

Your account is fine. Your upload didn’t fail. We lost your file.

🧭 How it happened

First, why we kept moving: for many of our readers in mainland China, our images loaded painfully slowly — or didn’t load at all.

It was one of the most frequent complaints we got. Where images live decides whether a whole group of people can read the site at all, so over the past year we changed providers three times looking for one that served those readers well. What we run today is the best answer we’ve found.

But each time we moved, only new uploads went to the new home — the existing images were never moved with them.

They kept pointing at the old address. As long as our account there was still open, they still loaded, and the problem stayed invisible. Then we closed one of those accounts, and the files went with it.

The moves were justified. Leaving the old images behind was not. Migrating the files you already have is the most basic part of moving storage, and we didn’t do it.

🎨 Where avatars stand now

An image that can’t load is worse than no image at all — the browser draws a harsh broken icon next to every single thing you’ve posted.

So we did one thing: we cleared the records pointing at files that no longer exist. With the record gone, the system generates your initials on a signature color instead — the same avatar new members get on day one.

No more broken icons. But that’s damage control, not recovery. Your original avatar is genuinely gone.

Please upload a new one

PNG, JPEG, or WEBP, up to 5MB. It takes effect immediately — no waiting.

If you like the initial avatar you have now, do nothing. It stays.

🖼️ Some article images were hit too

The full picture, honestly: the same batch of lost files also includes

• cover images for roughly 380 articles
• more than 1,700 images embedded inside article bodies

This affects the earliest uploads only, and the window is precise: images uploaded between June 2025 and the end of December 2025. Anything uploaded from January 2026 onward is intact — those files have been in our current storage from the start and are untouched by this.

They differ from avatars in one important way: there is no default to fall back on. A lost article image is simply a gap in the page. Those files are gone as well, and we have no way to restore them for you.

If you write long-form here, it’s worth spending a few minutes on anything you published before 2026. Covers and body images can both be edited and re-uploaded at any time.

🔒 Why it won’t happen again

• Every image we still have lives in one object store — no more split between old and new
• We added a health check that actively finds avatars whose record exists but whose file is gone — it’s what produced today’s fix, so we no longer wait for someone to see a broken icon
• Any future storage move treats migrating existing files as part of the move, not as something to get to later

🧪 One last thing — and this one’s an invitation

That’s the end of the apology. What follows is an invitation, and skipping it is completely fine.

We recently shipped multiplayer AI conversations, and we’re looking for people to put it through its paces.

Here’s the idea: any published AI conversation can be picked up by someone else, right where it left off — not copied, but grown as a new branch off the original. Your continuation is yours and carries your name, and it also appears back under the original, alongside everyone else’s branches.

• Open any AI conversation article and hit Continue this conversation at the bottom
• You choose which model answers your continuation — take what someone got out of one model and push it further with another
• Publish when you’re done, and it lands on the timeline as a post quoting the original

This is new and definitely rough in places. Three things we’d especially like to hear about: whether a relayed conversation reads well, whether branches get confusing once there are several, and whether you actually want to pick up someone else’s thread.

If something feels off, post about it or leave a comment and tell us.

💬 To the community

An avatar is a personal thing. It might be your cat, a photo you took, a symbol you’ve carried across the internet for years. We lost it, and “fixed” is not a word that covers that.

We could have quietly let the initial avatars take over and said nothing. You deserve to know where yours went, and that it was our fault.

We’re sorry. And thank you for still being here.

This fix is live on Web, iOS, and Android — no app update required.

Pickful Team
9.1