BuddyPress.org

You shouldn’t have to edit the core files at all. I had to whip up something similar today for a client which you may find helpful.

What it does is replace the email that is used to access the gravatar with a different one. I recommend you replace the default email template with your domain, so, the gravatar will remain persistant if it’s an identicon or wavatar:

class DisableUserGravatar {



var $email_template = "member.%USER%@yourwebsite.com";



function DisableUserGravatar(){

add_filter('get_avatar', array(&$this, 'wp_avatar'), 1, 5);

add_filter( 'bp_core_fetch_avatar', array(&$this, 'bp_avatar'), 1, 3);

}



function wp_avatar( $content, $id_or_email){

if( preg_match( "/gravatar.com/", $content ) ){

if ( is_numeric($id_or_email) ) {

$id = (int) $id_or_email;

$user = get_userdata($id);

} elseif ( is_object($id_or_email) ) {

if ( !empty($id_or_email->user_id) ) {

$id = (int) $id_or_email->user_id;

$user = get_userdata($id);

} elseif ( !empty($id_or_email->comment_author_email) ) {

return $content; //Commenters not logged in don't need filtering

}

} else {

$user = get_user_by_email($id_or_email);

}

if(!$user) return $content;

$username = $user->user_login;

$email = md5( str_replace('%USER%', $username, $this->email_template) );

return preg_replace("/gravatar.com\/avatar\/(.+)\?/", "gravatar.com/avatar/{$email}?", $content);

}

return $content;

}



function bp_avatar( $content, $params ){

if( is_array($params) && $params['object'] == 'user' ){

return $this->wp_avatar($content, $params['item_id']);

}

return $content;

}



}



global $DisableUserGravatar;

$DisableUserGravatar = new DisableUserGravatar();

Create a file in wp-content/mu-plugins with the content above.

I’ll put this up on wordpress.org as a plugin.

I understand the point behind standard Gravatar integration in WP & BP but what if your target audience is by no means tech-savy and has very low probability of having a Gravatar account (I myself don’t even have one…)?

Doesn’t that make multiplying http requests to display the default mistery man completely pointless? And with the integrated “avatar upload” function in Buddy press, i’m guessing anyone even remotely willing to upload an avatar will do it on site…

So can’t there be a straightforward way to just get “mistery man” directly from inside the buddy press install? As I understand it, Marcus’ plugin just avoids displaying the Gravatar but still sends out requests to gravatar.com which is not great for page speed.

I’m pretty sure a few people are concerned with this Gravatar dependency and would rather have the choice of wether or not to use the Gravatar service to display avatars.

Hi!

I’m looking for a way to disable gravatar and keeping a different defaut avatar for group and user.
Could I put a line to do the difference or not?

Thank you both very much for this code – very helpful.

And it is disturbing that there is no kill-switch for gravatars in the browser admin.

You can easily change the default avatar in your dashboard under BuddyPress > General Settings. The reason it doesn’t use the WordPress avatar setting is because BuddyPress is designed to be it’s own site with it’s own settings. If you want to disable gravatar support completely you can set no_grav to true in your theme’s bp_core_fetch_avatar function calls. This will be made even easier when 1.3 is released.

If anyone fancies a real challenge, what I should like to do is make a conditional that says:
If anyone does not have their own avatar, and if they do not have a gravatar, use this image.
Reason being, the result of the standard preference for gravatar if the user has none is the hideously dominant blue gravatar logo. Perhaps I should just replace that default graphic somehow, unless it too is called from gravatar.

Add the following in wp-content/plugins/bp-custom.php:
define( 'BP_AVATAR_DEFAULT', 'http://example.com/my-new-default-avatar.jpg' );

Change the link of the URL to your default avatar URL.