[admin (no pm's please)]

As with the smilies, system ranks are now coming from a different server. This is done transparently so you don't need to treat ranks differently.

Code waits in the wings to do similar things to template images, though there are a lot more issues to think about there, not least with smilies and ranks it does not absolutely matter if the images fail to show due to a server issue, you can't say that for template images.