“Avatar” on WP forum

gravatar.com

look at the source of the images?

I know how to place an “avatar”, but my “edit profile” doesn’t have the option!

Gangleri
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what did i type? was that not in english? wtf?

gravatar.com

LOOK at the source of the images.

Go here and signup for the gravatar service.
https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup

Ah, just never guessed that I had to sign up somewhere before I could edit my profile here. Usually there’s just an upload or deeplink option to add an image to a profile. (I guessed Gravatar was just some kind of Imageshack or something.)

you wont ever get an option in your profile. Thats not how gravatars work.

That’s the magic of the gravatar you don’t have to setup anything except at gravatar and anything that support gravatar automagically grabs the avatar. The new version of wordpress also supports this.

Personally I wonder about the idea of using someone else’s server as the host for something that shows up on your site. (and even ads are/have been an issue for this) What’s to stop the .jpg exploit that hit CNN.com from awhile ago from causing an infected image displaying on your site? Also, what happens if their site/server is down?

Maybe I’m a control freak, but not allowing any other way of displaying an avatar but having people sign up for some other site seems a bit strange…..

Exactly my idea… I already think that WP ‘talks a bit too much’ with all kinds of servers. It knows when I have an outdated plugin, it shows news from another server, etc. I’d like to have things more in my own hands.

Besides, I already have too many accounts on too many places, so I don’t think that I will get a Gravatar account just to have a nice profile on this forum.

Hmm. I don’t need ‘yet another login’ somewhere. So I’ll just leave it as a blank avatar on my profile.

Gravatars are not just for “this forum”. They are global, anybody can display gravatars. That’s the whole idea, to have one avatar everywhere, linked to your individual email address.

WordPress 2.5 has built in support for gravatars. Every WordPress blog can display them. Several other blog and CMS systems can also use them.

I setup my gravatar ages ago. When this forum just started supporting them recently, it showed up. Handy, and I didn’t have to change a thing.

Sorry, but I still see no reason to use gravatar avatars.

Well, then don’t. Nobody’s forcing you to. ??

Three more things against gravatars on your own blog:

1. Gravatar.com is another DNS lookup for the browser.
2. Gravatar.com doesn’t serve the images with a far Expires header or with Keep-Alive. Browsers won’t cache it.
3. Those without gravatars get the default image, yes, but these default images AREN’T the same image! Each default image requires a separate HTTP connection and an uncached HTTP request.

So adding this slows down your web pages, considerably… especially if you don’t put width and height attributes on the gravatar img tag.

1. One DNS lookup doesn’t take that long.
2. It sends an Expires header of half an hour in the future. The expire was done for a reason, I suspect. If somebody changes their avatar, half an hour almost seems too long to wait for it to take effect. And really, if their server can cope with it, then I don’t see the problem. You’re right about the Keep-Alive, but it does seem to use persistent connections anyway with a HTTP 1.1 client, regardless.
3. Adding lots of images to your own site will always slow it down, but if you use some kind of pagination for comments or otherwise limit the number of comments, then it’s not a particularly big deal.