[still giving]

When are we going to get rid of those fuggin’ awful Gravatars … both geometric and graphic.

I mean, come on … they are so discordant with the rest of the WP/BP design ethos.

I mean, it is another Automattic buy out … is there no way to bring the guy into harmony with rest of the scene or are they going to languish out there in the Automattic bardo … like BBpress … for the rest of eternity?

Does ANYONE actually like them?

[Pisanojm]

Nope… for our non-avatar-selected users, we simply use a custom graphic of the “mystery man” that blends well with our site…

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

@pisanojm ‘s suggestion is probably best. And yes, Gravatar.com is owned by Automattic.

[still giving]

If no one likes them, then why do we still slavishly use them?

Is Gravatar.com another BBpress that Matt got the hots about for 15 minutes, ditched and then forgot about?

Worse still, why does bp.org use EVEN BIGGER ones at the top of each group-forum-whateveritiscalled? I mean, the first 75% of the top of the page is fill up with absolutely nothing of any interest making it necessary for users to scroll down to read anything of interest.

That is REALLY BAD UI design.

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

@nonegiven Please keep your criticism constructive.

[mistercyril]

I don’t understand why there can’t be a simple option in the dashboard to disable Gravatars all together.

With the possibilities offered by BuddyPress, chances are there will be an increasing number of semi-corporate web sites or portals that will make it on line with a LOT of content. They are all going to want top scores in Page-Speed & Y-slow and getting an (F) on URL Redirects, because they might want to use the “recently active members” widget (for example), is not going to please anyone.

I understand wanting to promote an in house project, but even Microsoft had to give up forcing Internet Explorer on people… Couldn’t there be a simple “choice” which might default to Gravatar but still let users decide what they want to do with their website?

This is really inefficient and frustrating. Please consider this problem as a priority because it really is

[thelandman]

@nonegiven, @mistercyril

You can disable Gravatars! Perhaps you should put in some effort to research the subject. I have disabled it on many sites that I’ve built. I won’t lie to you, I’m not a fan of gravatar because the actual gravatars look cheap and tacky.

This plugin is the most effective and easiest way of disabling gravatar. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-user-gravatar/ It says its only compatible up to WP 2.8.6 but I’m using it on 3.0.1

[mistercyril]

Hello Landman,
Thanks for your input, but unfortunately I think you may have misread my post. I’ve seen this plugin around for a while, but it doesn’t address my problem at all.

I am concerned with making 25 HTTP requests to a service I don’t need. I would like my users to upload their own mugshot or have the default “MysteryMan” hosted directly on my server. Simple as that.

Sending purposely misleading information (random email address) to Gravatar and waiting for it to respond so that you can load a local file is just not best practice in my book. That’s why i’m asking for a way to cut Gravatar out of the loop completely.

If you have some insight on that, please do share. I’ve been searching for a while now but i’m starting to think i’m the only one concerned with performance.

Thanks,
C.

[Boone Gorges]

At the moment, there is no easy way to turn off Gravatar. I agree that there should be an easy way, as there can be performance concerns, as @mistercyril. (Though I find “I’m starting to think I’m the only one concerned with performance” unnecessarily confrontational.) I’ve had issues with it in the past myself.

I’ve just opened a ticket to make disabling Gravatar easier: https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2697 Until it’s been implemented, here’s the general core-hack strategy for disabling Gravatar altogether:
1) In bp-core/bp-core-avatars.php, find where the $defaults for bp_core_fetch_avatar() are set. Change
`’no_grav’ => false,`
to
`’no_grav’ => true,`

2) There will likely be some instances where the Mystery Man doesn’t kick in properly (group avatars, existing users). Write a filter for `’bp_core_fetch_avatar’` that sets the avatar to some default value when no avatar is returned.

[mistercyril]

Hello Boone,

Thank you for your reply. I really appreciate getting an actual answer as I may be pretty comfortable working with WordPress but BuddyPress code has me a bit lost at the moment. I will Try this and post back.

About my quote, i’m sorry if it seemed “confrontational” but I guess its just my frustration talking. I’ve been asking about this and searching for months but could never find a rational solution.

Thanks again,
I’ll try it out now.

[mistercyril]

Hello Boone,

So step 1 WORKS!
Hooray This was pretty simple, i’m sorry I couldn’t find it on my own.

As far as step 2 is concerned
You are right, previous users who had the mistery man icon don’t have an avatar anymore.
I took a look at the ‘bp_core_fetch_avatar’ section but i’m not quite sure how to write the filter you mentioned.
Could I abuse of your help and ask for an example? Would really be great.

Thank you,
C.

[Boone Gorges]

Cool, I’m glad the first part worked!

Here’s a thrown-together-in-five-minutes filter to replace missing avatars with BP’s default mystery man. This probably won’t differentiate between user and group avatars, which you’ll have to sniff out of the $params array (in sort of the same way that I do with width and height). The basic idea is: if bp_core_fetch_avatar is not outputting any HTML, swap out the boolean false with the default mystery man.

`function bbg_no_avatar( $html, $params ) {
if ( !$html ) {
if ( $params )
$height = ‘ height=”‘ . $params . ‘”‘;

if ( $params )
$height = ‘ width=”‘ . $params . ‘”‘;

$default_image_url = WP_PLUGIN_URL . ‘/buddypress/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg’;
$html = ‘‘;
}

return $html;
}
add_action( ‘bp_core_fetch_avatar’, ‘bbg_no_avatar’, 10, 2 );`