What is causing adult avatars to look like child avatars?

[Roche Runo]

I noticed today in my adult club,  adult  looking avatars  were  rezzing in  as  child  avatars.    When I asked what viewer were they using,  they all said  firestorm.    They then proceeded to  say  its my viewer's fault (viewer 3).    I know that v3 users appear as a cloud now when ruthed. Yet, I have seen old ruthed avatars  and always  the viewer used is fire storm.  So which viewer is at fault.  Theirs,  for not sending the correct data, or mine,  for not translating  the data  correctly.

[Ansariel Hiller]

If they all see each other correctly, most probably yours. Although it usually is not a fault in the viewer but in transmitting the avatar appearance parameters, which can be caused by the region stalling due to high load or connection issues.

[Theresa Tennyson]

If you're using an arbitrary height detector to determine who is a "child", they use a figure that's actually only the height of the avatar "bounding box" which stops about at an avatar's eye level. This is the same height Viewer 3 reports. Firestorm and many other third-party viewers use a calculation that scales this number up slightly to report a height that's closer to the actual height of the avatar to the top of its head. For instance, if the height detector is looking for 5'-4" to the top of the bounding box and the person sized their avatar using a calculation of their actual avatar height as 5'-5", the height detector will report them as being significantly shorter because it can't detect the actual height of the avatar to the top of its head.

Many people are making their avatars shorter than was traditional in order to be closer to their RL height. If you want to avoid losing customers you should recalibrate or get rid of your height detector.