I was going to change mine to conform to the rules but found I couldn't. I am happy to be called McTaffy or by my normal nickname of Taffy, and therefore am guessing leaving it as is, is ok. Don't want to confuse you with another Alan M either :p
Why must they be recognisable? To my knowledge no other publicly accessible forum insists on this. Facestalk, Twitter, comments pages of newspapers, arrse, bikeradar, etc all allow any photo/avatar so long as they're not offensive.
This is based on feedback from my children who have gotten into the habit of calling me God (aren't the powers of a parent great?) after I tell them to do something, the first sentence from them goes like "God, whinge whinge, why me etc..., snot fair ..."
I have ran a forum before, it had integrated calendar to topics, chat room either text based or more advanced using voice and cams as well if desired. Only signed in members could read posts and areas like testing were hidden from members. It had the ability to have forum moderators and each user could utilise the gallery function for pictures. It was skinnable and any picture could be used in the header.
Basically everything here and more. It was free as well.
So could you add all that functionality here or would you consider creating a new forum? I could create an example for you to see.