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Gravatar support?


Guest BryanH

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Would be relatively easy, but how popular is this particular service anyways?


Well this topic is the first i've heard of it :P

I read all about it on their site though and it sounds like quite a nice system. I still think it would be better as a mod than a built in feature though...
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Would be relatively easy, but how popular is this particular service anyways?



Its more a feature used in the blog world, where basically if you frequent sites a lot or participate, ect. when you comment anywhere that accepts a Gravatar it shows the image you have chosen. I know with wordpresses new release its a standard built in feature that you can use.
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Well this topic is the first i've heard of it :P



I read all about it on their site though and it sounds like quite a nice system. I still think it would be better as a mod than a built in feature though...



Me too and I concur; with its very limited scope, it simply does not warrant a built-in option unless IPB plans to develop a section for such things and make it a subcomponent.
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  • 5 months later...

Gravatar just celebrated its 1 year anniversary! And at the urging of WP founder Matt Mullenweg, I thought I'd post up some stats to help convince IPS to consider adding support.... hehe

Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers: 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server. That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day. That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily! 96% of all of those requests are served directly from cache. These days we get around 5,000 uploaded images every day. Even with this staggering increase in the number of requests we’ve been able to make Gravatar faster, and more reliable than it’s ever been.



I'm no PHP expert, but hopefully someday I can figure out how to add this to IPB. http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement That is, if IPS doesn't do it first! :D
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You know I look at this topic from the start and it seems that a lot of people are against the idea soley because they don't have a clue what a gravatar was at the time of posting or how beneficial it really is. Gravatars are widely used in just about every blogging system as well other systems. Adding support for it would be a major plus to IPB. Members who are lazy about choosing a avatar at every site they join can have a global gravatar so no matter what ipb site they join their avatar is already there based on their email.

I for one am tired of people joining my site that can't be bothered with updating their profile and sometimes I don't blame them. But it's the no avatar posts and comments that really bugs the hell out me anywhere. Gravatars are supported accross the board at myspace, facebook, myblog log, lastFm, wordPress, and a bunch of other systems.

It's a simple addition that I don't feel should be a 3rd party mod. Implement it is the best suggestion imo :P

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Have fun making a mod out of this. To create the gravatar image, the email address of the user needs passed in, and the get_avatar() function does not know that information. All places that an avatar would show would need their code updated to pass in the email address instead of the existing avatar settings, and then you'd probably also want to tweak the avatar section of the UserCP to allow people to use the gravatar or just use the standard IPB options. Lots o' edits to make a mod out of that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Have fun making a mod out of this. To create the gravatar image, the email address of the user needs passed in, and the get_avatar() function does not know that information. All places that an avatar would show would need their code updated to pass in the email address instead of the existing avatar settings, and then you'd probably also want to tweak the avatar section of the UserCP to allow people to use the gravatar or just use the standard IPB options. Lots o' edits to make a mod out of that.

I agree. I have no idea why some people think it will be simple to make a mod to do this within IPB. It's much easier and simpler to just use the existing gravatar method and have IPS incorporate it. I hope it makes it. Will make our forums look much nicer instead of the no avatar generic image plagued everwhere.
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I agree. I have no idea why some people think it will be simple to make a mod to do this within IPB. It's much easier and simpler to just use the existing gravatar method and have IPS incorporate it. I hope it makes it. [b]Will make our forums look much nicer instead of the no avatar generic image plagued everwhere.[/b]



And you think the majority of the people on your forum who aren't using avatars have signed up for gravatar? Unless you run a forum for bloggers, most probably haven't.
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The problem I see is that most people don't use, or have even heard of a Gravatar. You say it's based on email address? That means that it would have to check against their servers every time a registration is done. What about updates? And what about those that don't even use one?

I don't see a problem with:

1) Having a url they can paste in as their avatar, which they can then update from one location, thus updating it in all areas.

OR

2) Supporting something much more important like a common login gateway where when you "login" it copies common information to the board registration (which converge fits perfectly). Like windows live login or something.

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