By Alec Meer on October 30th, 2007 at 4:50 pm.
Possibly. I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing. But you’ll notice most guys in comments now have a mysterious silhouette next to their message, while the clever ones have a clever picture up. If their picture is of boobies, it won’t be for long, trust me.
Anyhoo, either click on one of those or click here and you’ll be taken to Gravatar, where you can upload your pic. First you’ll need to create an account using the email address you enter when you leave a comment here, but it’s very quick and non-intrusive. The email address must be all lower-case, so you may need to switch to another address for commenting here if you currently use a sIlLy l33T handle or something.
Images should be 50×50 max (though Gravatar seems to explode images of that size into 80×80, so I’m a bit confused at the moment), and safe for innocent eyes – you’ll be asked to age-rate it when you upload, and when you do select ‘PG.’ If you upload a picture of a distended rectum and still label it PG so that it shows up here, you can rest assured we’ll keep deleting your comments until you grow up.
In some cases there’s a wait before your avatar shows up, so patience, laddie. If you just want to check that your avatar’s working, you can always simply look at a previous comment you’ve posted, rather than adding a ‘testing…’ one to the boring mountain of ‘em already in this thread, though it’s understandable if you’re not sure where you last commented. Definitely don’t follow up a test comment with another one if the first doesn’t work though, because that’s just annoying and makes it harder for us to check for real problems – just hit refresh once you’ve made your Gravatar change. The avatars work retrospectively too, y’see.
Other than that, go get ‘em. Mine’s working, look: 
30/10/2007 at 16:53 Alec Meer says:
(testing)
30/10/2007 at 16:59 Thiefsie says:
lets see shall we
30/10/2007 at 17:00 Monkfish says:
Testing 1-2-3.
30/10/2007 at 17:01 Jim Rossignol says:
Mine seems to work.
30/10/2007 at 17:01 Sören Höglund says:
Hmm. I wonder if my old gravatar account still works…
30/10/2007 at 17:07 Thiefsie says:
holy huge formatting batlady
30/10/2007 at 17:14 Nick says:
(also testing)
30/10/2007 at 17:15 Nick says:
It was working..
30/10/2007 at 17:16 Alexander says:
baaaam, then everyone suddenly notices this man is damn hot
30/10/2007 at 17:17 roBurky says:
You had an an image a moment ago, Alec. Now you don’t.
30/10/2007 at 17:18 Feet says:
Let’s see…
30/10/2007 at 17:21 Monkfish says:
testing for case sensitivity.
30/10/2007 at 17:24 Monkfish says:
Aha! The MD5 hash generating routine you’re using isn’t case insensitive, by the looks of things. If I change my email addy to all lowercase, it works.
30/10/2007 at 17:27 Feet says:
Erk, grey background.
*fixes*
30/10/2007 at 17:40 Seniath says:
*Testing the new shiny*
30/10/2007 at 17:40 Kast says:
I vonder… test!
30/10/2007 at 17:41 Kast says:
Bwahahah! I thought I would get sent somewhere to create an account but Gravatar remembered me. :) How nice!
30/10/2007 at 17:42 Seniath says:
Bah, it no worky.
30/10/2007 at 17:42 Feet says:
It’s not actually 80 x 80 is it?
30/10/2007 at 17:43 finished_okami_a_while_ago says:
is this thing working?
30/10/2007 at 17:43 The_B says:
Hmm, is my current one on?
30/10/2007 at 17:44 Alec Meer says:
The site’s set to default to 50×50 images, but Gravatar.com itself seems to resize everything to 80. I’m pretty confused.
30/10/2007 at 17:44 Seniath says:
One final test. Then I’ll shut up, I swear. Unless it works. If it works, I shall reply saying ‘woot’
30/10/2007 at 17:45 finished_okami_a_while_ago says:
hmm… I think now I’ve got everything right. let’s try…
30/10/2007 at 17:45 drunkymonkey says:
Hurray, I still have my Gravatar account from when I was a poster on Grumpy Gamer (luckily, I was also able to guess my password from back then, too), and my, hasn’t it changed its accessibility.
Anyway, now Murray can live on.
30/10/2007 at 17:47 The_B says:
Well, mine’s from posting on Cobbert’s blog. So I’d already setup from back then.
Although the irony will make me giggle if he comes on now and it breaks.
30/10/2007 at 17:53 Cigol says:
I’ve uploaded mine, but am I not allowed to select ‘G’ rating? Not working at a glance :(
30/10/2007 at 17:55 Monkfish says:
Is it down to case-sensitivity? All my previous comments were made using an email address that started with a capital “M”. I copied and pasted this email address when I registered at Gravatar, but it looks like they converted it to lowercase. All my old comments don’t show the avatar, but since I’ve just started using an all-lowercase email address, it seems to be working fine.
30/10/2007 at 17:56 Cargo Cult says:
Gravatars are great, if a bit too much Web-2.0-run-on-happiness-and-good-wishes rather than sound engineering.
The system will occasionally randomly forget to display your gravatar, or spend months trying to load. Adding width=”x” height=”y” gubbins to the img tag should at least give browsers a chance to lay out the page properly, before fruitlessly demanding images from the overloaded happy-sunbeams-and-buttercups Gravatar servers.
30/10/2007 at 18:00 Cigol says:
It’s a nice idea… but wouldn’t it be better if once requested the sites in question took over from the main server?…
30/10/2007 at 18:07 Kieron Gillen says:
I don’t believe it’s working for me. Luckily, I don’t really care that much. I’m sure it’ll sort itself out.
KG
30/10/2007 at 18:07 Alec Meer says:
The plugin I’ve used is supposed to cache the avatars locally here, but as we saw during the initial hoopla, that just seems to result in a big ? for all comers.
30/10/2007 at 18:08 Kieron Gillen says:
Oooh! it is!
KG
30/10/2007 at 18:14 Alec Meer says:
What a pink robot you have there, Kieron.
30/10/2007 at 18:14 Alexander says:
does it really work? dman why doesn’t it?
30/10/2007 at 18:15 Cigol says:
Hurrah… now we can go back to doing whatever it was we were doing.
30/10/2007 at 18:15 Flibster says:
Testing…
30/10/2007 at 18:16 Lu-Tze says:
This space intentionally left blank
30/10/2007 at 18:19 Andrew says:
Hopefully this will work.
30/10/2007 at 18:19 Flibster says:
Yay, it works
30/10/2007 at 18:20 Andrew says:
Eventually.
30/10/2007 at 18:22 drunkymonkey says:
Apparently it’s gone again for me.
30/10/2007 at 18:26 The_B says:
I wonder if it’s just an issue with lots of people doing avatars at once, and that it might sort itself out once demand has died down?
That or the internet is being run by GLaDOS again.
30/10/2007 at 18:30 bluespacetiger says:
Testing…
30/10/2007 at 18:44 Andrew says:
It seems to take a while to apply once you’ve set them up.
30/10/2007 at 19:00 The_B says:
Aye, I think it’s mainly people creating first time accounts with Gravatar that’s doing it more than anything.
30/10/2007 at 19:10 Seniath says:
Is mine working yet?
30/10/2007 at 19:16 Andrew says:
Yes.
30/10/2007 at 19:36 yxxxx says:
It should work as i had made one a while ago testing
30/10/2007 at 19:39 Matthew Craig says:
I gotcher Dee-falt Gravytar RAYT HEYAR.
//\Oo/\\
30/10/2007 at 20:04 Andrew Farrell says:
Testing…
30/10/2007 at 20:10 Ben Hazell says:
Testing ;)
May I suggest that the default image for ‘folk without avatars’ be a Rorschach inkblot image…
30/10/2007 at 20:12 Lh'owon says:
Oops, accidental post, nothing whatsoever to do with testing.
30/10/2007 at 20:16 Aquatopia says:
Testing.
30/10/2007 at 20:17 Aquatopia says:
Blast.
30/10/2007 at 20:18 Lh'owon says:
Heh, in a fit of genius I managed not to select my avatar after uploading. I are clever.
(last post, promise)
30/10/2007 at 20:21 Alec Meer says:
Okay, so one ‘testing’ is fair enough if you can’t find a recent comment you made elsewhere on the site. But one person posting multiple tests in this thread is just a bit inconsiderate, given they can simply press refresh on this page and their last comment will reflect their avatar changes.
30/10/2007 at 20:34 Alec Meer says:
Also, I’ve a) found a better default avatar icon (with thanks to those who made/started making an alternative) and b) added a comments preview thingy, so you can check your URLs and whatnot work before you post.
30/10/2007 at 20:37 The_B says:
Oo-eer Alec, with all these WordPress plugins you may break the internets!
(Despite the fact I have a habit of installing a fair amount of shiny plugins on my own blog ¬_¬)
30/10/2007 at 20:37 Cargo Cult says:
Testing!
…
For those of you not knowing how Gravatars work: the blog takes your otherwise hidden email address, runs the one-way MD5 mangling algorithm on it, and gets a big long hexadecimal ‘key’ unique to that email address. It then puts an appropriate image link in the page, which makes your browser ask the Gravatar servers* for an image corresponding to that key string. It’s equivalent to putting your email address in that image link, except spammers would need a ridiculous amount of computing power to reverse that MD5 mangling.
So basically, if you have a Gravatar associated with an email address, every single comment you’ve posted with that email address will now have your Gravatar next to it. Even if it was a long time ago.
Clever!
* Assuming there’s no caching being done on the blog…
30/10/2007 at 20:38 arqueturus says:
Death’s head?
30/10/2007 at 20:42 Alec Meer says:
Yes, yes?
30/10/2007 at 21:12 arqueturus says:
Heh, great character been years since I thought of him.
30/10/2007 at 21:57 Kismet says:
Does it work? Does it? It does.
30/10/2007 at 23:12 Solario says:
Testing?
30/10/2007 at 23:23 wiper says:
Is I is or is I ain’t visible?
31/10/2007 at 00:11 Masked Dave says:
Test!
31/10/2007 at 00:29 Xagarath says:
That Death’s Head avatar is possibly the best I have yet encountered on the internet.
31/10/2007 at 01:36 MPK says:
The inevitable sig-test-me-do.
Oh look, a preview window. What’s the countdown to it becoming self aware and pre-empting our comments before unleashing global thermo-nuclear war?
Or should I lay off the Czech beer?
31/10/2007 at 07:33 CrashT says:
Obligatory testing post.
31/10/2007 at 09:13 Iain says:
@MPK:
Czech beer is the bestest. Apart from perhaps the Oktoberfest beer that Sainsburys are going to stop selling in a couple of days because it’s no longer October… Ah, well. Only another 11 months to wait.
Oh, and test.
31/10/2007 at 09:20 finished_okami_a_while_ago says:
This is a bit like the moment during a party, when all the lights go on and sudenly you see, who you’ve been spending the last few hours with.
31/10/2007 at 10:40 Alex Hopkinson says:
You really should have used “Avatars, Yes?” as the topic title!
31/10/2007 at 10:41 AbyssUK says:
testing – inside out teddy bears make me cry
31/10/2007 at 10:43 Alec Meer says:
A fine point, Alex. Obscure 80s comicbook references FTW.
31/10/2007 at 10:55 MPK says:
@Iain
The only problem I have with Czech beers – and eastern european beers in general – is that they think 5%abv is weak.
Zywiec is a fine Polish lager that can also be used to aneasthetise cows.
31/10/2007 at 11:23 Tom Edwards says:
There’s a handy WordPress plugin that lets you cache gravatars locally. Away from FTP access I forget what it’s called…
Also, my gravatar rocks.
31/10/2007 at 11:25 Alec Meer says:
Tried it. Didn’t work. Or at least it didn’t work easily and quickly enough for me not to lose the motivation to keep faffing around with it.
31/10/2007 at 14:49 KindredPhantom says:
Test.
31/10/2007 at 14:51 KindredPhantom says:
..
31/10/2007 at 16:23 Iain says:
@MPK
My liver is intimately acquainted with Zywiec. My local supermarket stocks Lech and Tyskie, as well. They’re both equally good for anesthetising cows (and Glaswegians).
The latter is especially good, if only because it’s an onomatopoeia for the sound my girlfriend makes whenever I get a bottle of it out of the fridge…
31/10/2007 at 22:41 James Lyon says:
Can you see me? Huh? Huh?
31/10/2007 at 23:04 Icarus says:
I’m afraid I have to post a “testing” comment, since I don’t remember if/where I’ve commented on RPS before. I chose ‘G’-rated now, so let’s see if it works.
01/11/2007 at 03:34 xeno says:
Yes!
02/11/2007 at 10:57 KindredPhantom says:
Hopefully working.
04/11/2007 at 12:48 Watcher95 says:
Testes..1..2…3?
04/11/2007 at 12:48 Watcher95 says:
one more try
04/11/2007 at 12:52 Thiefsie says:
wooo twin bee!
it has to be g rated people :)
12/11/2007 at 13:24 Fat Zombie says:
Testing, testing.
18/08/2008 at 22:18 Nameykins says:
testing, one two three
03/11/2008 at 02:59 laptop batteries says:
acer aspire 5920 battery
07/11/2008 at 02:01 battery says:
We specialize in laptop battery,laptop AC adapters. All our products are brand new, with the excellent service from our laptop battery of customer service team.
the most convenient and cheap replacement battery online shop in uk. We specialize in laptop batteries,laptop AC adapters.
All our laptop AC adapters are brand new, with the excellent service from our customer service team.
the most convenient and cheap battery online shop in uk.
You can find some battery and adapter from here is very cool.
11/01/2010 at 09:49 mr distended rectum says:
i am testing this NOW
09/08/2010 at 07:57 party gowns says:
Great resource. I really enjoyed your site!
09/08/2010 at 17:48 Berzee says:
testing, indeed
27/10/2010 at 14:00 Jolly Teaparty says:
Testing
18/11/2010 at 23:50 LudwigTheurer says:
Testing
13/12/2010 at 22:52 KIm says:
It dosn´t work for me :(
04/07/2011 at 17:27 steadystate says:
Testing…
01/12/2011 at 18:34 Shodan says:
test