We host all avatars on our server. The more files we host, the more space we need. In addition, if you are consistently loading pages with a lot of different avatars, you may use more bandwidth than if you had just a handful of images for everyone to share.
For example, say we had a board that served exactly 100 pages one particular day, and each page had posts from ten unique users. If we offered custom avatar uploads on that forum, we could end up transfering up to 1000 images, assuming everyone had a picture. On the other hand, if we restricted avatars to a selection of 50 images that people could choose among, even if each of the images was used by someone, we might get away with serving only 50 images, since most browsers cache files for a time. And no matter how many times an image is displayed on a page, it is downloaded only once, so if you have two or more users with the same avatar, that's as good as having one or more with no avatar.
If the other forum has very limited resources, the admins might understandably disallow custom avatars, but since almost all of them are small GIF or JPEG files, you'd have to be pretty hard-up. Suggest that they limit the file sizes to something agreeable and monitor their disk and bandwidth usage for a month to see how it works out.
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