Ok, I feel like I'm chasing my own tail here, so I'll pause for a breather. Here's what I'm looking at:
So the code that (more or less) sets the size of the user picture is in outputrenderers.php, right? (line 2280 or so)
if (empty($userpicture->size)) {
$size = 35;
} else if ($userpicture->size === true or $userpicture->size == 1) {
$size = 100;
} else {
$size = $userpicture->size;
}
But I don't want to mess with that to tweak forum avatar sizes, because that's just a general switch that flips based on the 'size' parameter fed from some other function call.
All I can find in mod/forum/renderer.php that has to do with user pictures is a function subscriber_overview that has this comment: This function generates HTML to display a subscriber overview, primarily used on the subscribers page if editing was turned off.
So that's not what I want. There doesn't seem to be anything there having to do with user pictures in general, so I went looking elsewhere.
In /mod/forum/view.php, there is a function forum_print_latest_discussions that seems to be invoked when we're finally getting down to business. That traces back to /mod/forum/lib.php, where there's this bit:
// Picture
$postuser = new stdClass();
$postuserfields = explode(',', user_picture::fields());
$postuser = username_load_fields_from_object($postuser, $post, null, $postuserfields);
$postuser->id = $post->userid;
echo '<td class="picture">';
echo $OUTPUT->user_picture($postuser, array('courseid'=>$forum->course));
echo "</td>\n";
Which seems to be where I'd want to feed an extra 'size == 1' parameter to make outputrenderers.php kick out a large-sized user pic. Except that snippet is outputting table/cell code that doesn't exist in the actual rendered web page.
The Clean theme is on BootstrapBase, right, but I haven't found anything helpful in renderers there, either.
So I think I'm pretty well lost (I'm not even sure I'd be able to explain this stuff again, if I needed to!) -- am I headed way off the rails?