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I know that Stackoverflow does as well, yet I have not come across it on any other mainstream sites. Is it simply a question of off-loading data to a third party site in order to increase the speed of OSQA? Thanks in advance for any answers.
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Well I have use gravatar plugins in some blogs. I have to use a third party provider for my blogs avatar rather than uploading an image directly from pc. Though it's not a really good idea because other users might not like it. But for now, it does the job for me. |
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While I cannot speak for the OSQA dev team, I would direct you to review the gravatar discussion on SO. IMHO, the closest to a "Good" answer you're going to get is that it was easy to implement for the developers. This is not uncommon in the community - check another box on the feature request list without significant effort... Here's a link to the SO discussion: Which Itch Does A Gravatar Scratch? Paraphrasing my favorite response: it provides value by providing consistent avatars across sites and making it possible to have avatars pre-loaded on a site when a user signs up. (Personal note: These are classic examples of benefits that would accrue once the Gravatar network reaches significant scale. Arguably, Gravatar isn't there yet.) |
You know I've been wondering this myself. When I first joined this community it took me more than a day to figure out how to show my avatar. And I wouldn't consider myself to be tech-challenged precisely but I still felt it was a bit difficult thing to do. I wouldn't want to know how my users might think of it.
I think it would be wise if OSQA switched to supporting its own avatars and make it easy for anyone to simply upload and crop their own pictures on site, without asking them to register with a third party.
Or alternatively, support both options.
Gravatar is not bad but is really painful to change the avatar if you get one of those randomly generated :/
Especially when using the "monsters", as some of them look unfortunately obscene to the over-imaginative mind.
Thanks for the comments... Somewhat confirmed my suspicions! Although again, I think it may be to do with performance issues... Would be useful to hear from one of the OSQA creators on the subject.
I am trying to figure out a way to turn off Gravatar on my site and move to an all-in-house profile picture solution. I've found that 99% of my users have absolutely no idea how that they can change their profile picture using Gravatar. I'd definitely like to understand whether there was a specific performance issue that underlies the decision to use Gravatar, or whether it was merely an issue of convenience (e.g., not having to integrate a profile picture module).
I think this was more a function of the system that OSQA is based on (convenience then). Our enterprise product, Qato, has the ability to let users upload their own pictures. We can probably find a nice Django solution to integrate with OSQA, but there are no plans at the moment.