Avatars

Have you considered using Gravatar for avatars?

I've found it surprisingly useful have a 'global' avatar connect to my accounts

Stravatar is better

I like Blavatar.

There were gravatars a while back. They looked horrible.

And skeletors.

Have you considered using Gravatar for avatars?

I've found it surprisingly useful have a 'global' avatar connect to my accounts

We haven't actually got to avatars yet, the implementation... but we can look at it.

My only concern would be that gravatars over SSL would slow the site down.

That's a no then.

Speed >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> stupid pictures

Well, it could be proxied somehow.

Meh

Can hippy be proxied somehow?

As you've already seen we user gravatar, but with the new Wordpress account stuff, it feels like too much indirection to get set up with an avatar image. If somebody's never used any of the services, they suddenly have to work out what Persona is, then Gravatar, perhaps Wordpress, etc.

So what we do now (or will do next week, when deployed):

• on signup, we check if your email address has an associated gravatar, and fetch it if so
  
• if there's no gravatar for the email address, a unique identicon is generated for the profile, e.g:
  
  

• to update it, you can upload an image in much the same way as you do on lfgss (though it won't propagate back to your gravatar account, if you have one).
  
  

There's a load of boring details about how to resize images or treat ones that aren't square that need to be ironed out, but that's the gist.