Hi luckyhair,
Update - This issue has been discussed among our engineering team for most of last week and, unfortunately, the way our image uploaders handle gif format images is going to remain the way it is now for the most part. While we're not exactly sure what caused this change in behavior, the behavior you have described makes sense based on the way the uploader is designed and we are not going to attempt to change our uploading interface to support these images (only a tiny fraction of the images in our system are in gif format).
If you upload gif images using the Auctiva Uploader, it is normal for the images to become distorted because that uploader will convert all images to jpg format during the uploading process. Any conversion of a gif file to a jpg file has issues with color conversion from 16 million to 256 colors that can potentially cause distortion between the original image file and the resulting jpg image as it appears within Auctiva.
We are going to be looking into the issue of the HTML Uploader causing animated gifs to lose their animated qualities further and, if it is feasible to correct that problem, we may be able to get it resolved as early as our next major release, which is tentatively scheduled to take place in mid-late December. While it is possible you will be able to successfully upload your gif images after that update, we will never be able to officially support non-standard gif formats due to restrictions on our image processing library.
As long as you are unable to successfully upload your gif images into Auctiva and have them come out the way you would like, you could potentially host those images outside of Auctiva and then code them into the HTML of your listings while you are creating them through Auctiva.
I wish I had better news for you, but I hope you find this information to be helpful nonetheless. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our customer support team.
-Mike