BuddyPress.org

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

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

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.

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.

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 );`