Re: Am I going mad or are there now avatars next to posts in the Activity stream?
This change is not documented nor annouced in the update post on the BP blog.
About this “some minor tweaks to the included theme”, nobody knows what to do,exactly to retrieve or edit this gravatar. Except here in this tread, which will be buried in the next 3 days in the deepness of this forum
I consider this a bit unfair to find such a picture at this strategic place represented by the SWA page without any permission ! This change can also (as already mentionned) compromise some fine tuned template skills. And what to say about breaking long discuted graphical convention ?
I want at minimum have the possibility to change it, like i can do it for my group avatar for ex.
In 2009, we could choose to use wavarar, gravatar or monsterID from within the admin.
Since 1.2.2 or so, Gravatar is gone (silently) from the admin interface. Now he’s back via SWA….
What do we do(and think) tomorrow, if suddenly Gravatar.com send us an advertising icon instead of a graphic abstract as actually ?
What the sense of all those thousands of millions of icons flying around the web ?
Only to have pretty links or to organize some juicy statistics and server consumption ? The non GPL part of the trick i guess…. 
