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Gravatar addition to Avatar Plugin

I am sorry about the gravatar subject taking the other thread off topic. As was discussed earlier, I think it would be a nice addition to add gravatar support for people that are “not members” of your community as there are quite a few sites with many external comments that would be nice to not show the default avatar.

I agree with drmike in thinking that any “member” will be served the default avatar to encourage members to actually use the avatar plugin, but any “non-member” could be checked for a gravatar and if not, show the default avatar (since gravatars default really is not nice).

Does this idea work with what others are seeing with their communities and blogs?

Thanks for the time.

Trent

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:20:15
  • Luke
    • The Crimson Coder

    AFAIK, with gravatar if they don’t have an avatar then it simply returns their default, without a chance to use your own.

    Honestly though, I’m not fond of loading a lot of things which are external to a site. Reason being, if that site is slow, your site is too. In turn, that makes your site look slow to users, and a lot of them don’t understand the difference.

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    AFAIK, with gravatar if they don’t have an avatar then it simply returns their default, without a chance to use your own.

    I believe that’s correct as well but I could have sworn that the filename is set to be a generic and could probably do some sort of check. If you’re falling down to using Gravatar’s default, you should have already looked for the user’s local avatar as well as over at gravatar so you’re going to be serving a default anyway.

    I’m not fond of loading a lot of things which are external to a site

    Agreed. Also if you’re pulling from multiple sites, you’re telling the browser to make multiple connections and (I’d have to go digging for articles on the subject) I could have sworn that some browsers had issues with pulling from 2 or more sites at the same time. Anyway multiple connections from multiple sites is something most advanced HTML lessons tell you not to do although is probably fine for the stuff we’re doing.

    And I’m sorry to say but my trust with Automattic is rather lacking for a number of reasons, both personal and professional. My attorney won’t allow me to go into details but the idea of having my personal paying clients pull data from Automattic servers from my hosted Class C’s isn’t something that I can’t put my trust in.

  • trent
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    I have actually quit using widgets that call other sites for that reason actually. Fair enough about the external website calls on a basic plugin. How about the following as a compromise if Andrew doesn’t like the gravatar implementation:

    Show the default avatar “if” the user is a member and don’t show an avatar at all if the user is “not” a member. I personally wouldn’t even mind that so I don’t have a comment page full of “default avatars” :slight_smile:

    Trent

  • Andrew
    • Champion of Loops
      Show the default avatar “if” the user is a member and don’t show an avatar at all if the user is “not” a member. I personally wouldn’t even mind that so I don’t have a comment page full of “default avatars” :slight_smile:

    I’ll make than an option tomorrow or Friday.

      Might be helpful if the “default avatar” was something besides a blank white box or a gray figure head.

    If you’re referring to our avatars plugin then the default avatar can easily be changed.

    @luke: I’m really going to reply to your email in the morning if I don’t get anything else done. Very sorry about the delay.

    Thanks,

    Andrew

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    If you’re referring to our avatars plugin then the default avatar can easily be changed.

    Actually that was meant in general and not towards you, Andrew. Kind of like having a default theme of something else besides Qbert, I mean Kubrick.