I want everything to be simpler but this Gravatar works against me.
I had to sign in through Wordpress which I haven’t used in a zillion years. It turns out I do have a Wordpress account but it’s tied to an old email address so now Gravatar has my avatar linked to a defunct email address which they say I can’t delete (why?) but I can add a new email address.
Shouldn’t we all have a sign above our desks that says: 'If there’s a simpler way to do this, that doesn’t expose our information to yet another untrustworthy website - use the simpler way."?
What do we gain by going out to Gravatar, through Wordpress, back to Gravatar and then on to McNeel’s Discourse? Probably a truckload of spam following this new routing of my email address around the Internet like a bunch of stray cats.
The complaint on sites that have accounts with avatars used to be “why do I have to have a different avatar all over the web? If I want to change it, I must go to all my accounts and change it there. What a pain!”
Gravatar solves that problem by making the avatar associated with your email addresses.
Clearly this seems like overkill when you are using Gravatar for the first time. I now have about 5 or 6 different accounts now that track use my Gravatar, and I am grateful to only maintain it in one place.
It turns out that it is also very simple from a web development point of view to use Gravatar - simpler than making an avatar system for the site itself.
Having a site specific Gravatar is on the roadmap for Discourse, but hasn’t gotten done yet.
Great! Looks like this got merged so we’ll see the feature the next time discourse rolls a version number (that is the only time we currently update our server.)
Thanks, I’m sure many of our users will appreciate this.
I don’t see that option? There is no indication anywhere in Discourse preferences on how to set a profile image, Gravatar or otherwise. I stumbled across a reference to Gravatar by accident ( Welcome to McNeel Forums ) and am horrified by the idea that I must create a WordPress account to create one? I can see that this is a very old complaint - no action yet? https://discourse.mcneel.com/search?q=gravatar
I’m far more concerned about the spam potential of creating a Gravatar account than I am about the insignificant programming burden of supporting profile/avatar images specific to this forum.
Thank you very much. That option is completely hidden for users who are only looking at the Discourse forums.
There will be many more (like me) moving over from the old Ning forum who are unlikely to find it.
P.S. I added a profile image to my accounts.rhino3d.com but don’t see it on my Discourse forum replies?
Apparently one must log out of Discourse and log back in again to see avatar changes made in accounts.rhino3d.com ? I’ll try that next but wonder if anyone else sees my avatar change without doing the same thing? I see this is an old issue with many forum threads and posts on the subject. The fact that updating a profile photo is this difficult and obscure is quite frankly ridiculous!
Tried that, it doesn’t work. Furthermore, using a different browser that has never logged in to rhino3d.com or the Discourse forum, I still see the default avatar icon on my posts while others show images - WAIT! Just looked again now and the change has taken effect, many minutes after making the change and logging off/on again. Crazy!
