Up until yesterday, the Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) blog lay dormant for nine years, the last post chronicling how the team set out to create a Gravatar app that somehow “morphed into a Selfies app.” Communication went silent after that, although the Twitter account posted occasionally. The service has pivoted to become “a personal digital business…
Gravatar is fielding questions today after “Have I Been Pwned,” a data breech checker service, tweeted “New scraped data: Gravatar had 167M profiles scraped in Oct last year via an enumeration vector. 114M of the MD5 email address hashes were subsequently cracked and distributed alongside names and usernames.“ It claims 72% of these email addresses…
Ari Stathopoulos released his new Local Gravatars plugin last week. The goal of the plugin is to allow site owners to take advantage of the benefits of a global avatar system while mitigating privacy concerns by hosting the images locally. In essence, it is a caching system that stores the images on the site owner’s…
It is an age-old question. OK, well, it’s really a 10-year-old feature request, but that is age-old in software development years. Should WordPress have a local avatar system? Let’s be honest. Most of us have kind of gritted our teeth and quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — lived with the Automattic-owned properties that…
I maintain a website with active user registration and a common support question I’m asked is, “How do I change my profile picture?” The answer is not easy as it should be. WordPress’ profile image system is powered by Gravatar, an Automattic owned service. It replaced the old method of uploading a profile picture in…
Gravatar, acquired in 2007, is a service owned and operated by Automattic that allows you to assign profile images to email addresses. These images are used automatically when registering an account on sites or services that support Gravatar. Support for Gravatar was added in WordPress 2.5 “Brecker”. The other day, I registered an account on a new gaming site that uses…
Out of the box, WordPress allows you to configure the default avatar that displays for commenters that don’t have one. The choices leave a lot to be desired. Thanks to a new plugin created by Lee Willis, called Wapuuvatar, you can replace default avatars with images of Wapuu. If you’re not familiar with Wapuu, it’s…
Version 2.6.5 of the popular Antispam Bee plugin is out today with a new feature that allows administrators to trust commenters with a Gravatar. The idea for the function was suggested by Caspar Hübinger, a long-time user of the plugin. “Have you ever seen a spam comment with a Gravatar image? I haven’t,” Hübinger said…
Earlier this year, Automattic’s Toni Schneider asked Gravatar users what platform should be first to receive the Gravatar mobile app. No details on the purpose of the Gravatar app were revealed at the time but it turns out that the team has been busy developing a photo app. While working on the Gravatar app, they…
Despite the fact that Gravatar is the default avatar service built into WordPress, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There are times when you may want to use a different avatar on a specific site but don’t want to change your Gravatar image. In some instances WordPress site admins choose to disable the service for…
Toni Schneider, who recently switched positions with Matt Mullenweg inside Automattic has asked on the Gravatar blog, Which platform should a Gravatar app be released for first?. The choices are iOS, Android, or other. At the time of writing, Android was leading the poll with 80 votes while iOS is in second with 67 votes.…
Automattic is making waves today in the fight against censorship, filing two lawsuits against those who are abusing the DMCA by misrepresenting copyright infringement. The company is taking a stand against the fraudulent misuse of copyright law in order to protect WordPress.com users from censorship. Meanwhile, the other dark side of censorship – the one…
Having an avatar hosted by Gravatar is the best way to use your own picture in comments on millions of sites around the web. Currently Gravatar serves avatars more than 8.6 billion times per day. It is the default avatar service for WordPress-powered sites and many others, including github, Disqus, stackoverflow, Trello and more. Beyond…
Alex Mills who is also known as Viper007Bond has discovered that Battlelog, EA’s game management site for Battlefield 3 has chosen to use Gravatar to power their profile images. This is great news for Gravatar as Battlefield 3 is going to be the hottest game being played for quite some time. I hope this type…
Thanks to an extension for Thunderbird called Display Contact Photo, you can now view Gravatars within emails in Thunderbird. The Gravatar blog has a good explanation on how to setup and install the extension. I’ve installed the extension as Thunderbird is my email client of choice. So don’t be surprised to see a beer mug…