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Avatars, Yes?
Written by Alec Meer on October 30, 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: 
Related Stories:
92Comment on this story — Share/save/Digg this story
Tags: avatars, god-i-bet-i-broke-something, tedious-site-babble
__________________
Monkfish says:
Testing 1-2-3.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Sören Höglund says:
Hmm. I wonder if my old gravatar account still works…
October 30th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Nick says:
(also testing)
October 30th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Nick says:
It was working..
October 30th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Alexander says:
baaaam, then everyone suddenly notices this man is damn hot
October 30th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
roBurky says:
You had an an image a moment ago, Alec. Now you don’t.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Feet says:
Let’s see…
October 30th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Monkfish says:
testing for case sensitivity.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Feet says:
Erk, grey background.
*fixes*
October 30th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Kast says:
I vonder… test!
October 30th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Kast says:
Bwahahah! I thought I would get sent somewhere to create an account but Gravatar remembered me. :) How nice!
October 30th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Feet says:
It’s not actually 80 x 80 is it?
October 30th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
finished_okami_a_while_ago says:
is this thing working?
October 30th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
The site’s set to default to 50×50 images, but Gravatar.com itself seems to resize everything to 80. I’m pretty confused.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Seniath says:
One final test. Then I’ll shut up, I swear. Unless it works. If it works, I shall reply saying ‘woot’
October 30th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
finished_okami_a_while_ago says:
hmm… I think now I’ve got everything right. let’s try…
October 30th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Cigol says:
I’ve uploaded mine, but am I not allowed to select ‘G’ rating? Not working at a glance :(
October 30th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Monkfish says:
It’s not working for some people, and I don’t really know why. Bah.
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
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?…
October 30th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
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
October 30th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Alexander says:
does it really work? dman why doesn’t it?
October 30th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Cigol says:
Hurrah… now we can go back to doing whatever it was we were doing.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Lu-Tze says:
This space intentionally left blank
October 30th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
bluespacetiger says:
Testing…
October 30th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Andrew says:
It seems to take a while to apply once you’ve set them up.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
The_B says:
Aye, I think it’s mainly people creating first time accounts with Gravatar that’s doing it more than anything.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
yxxxx says:
It should work as i had made one a while ago testing
October 30th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Andrew Farrell says:
Testing…
October 30th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Ben Hazell says:
Testing ;)
May I suggest that the default image for ‘folk without avatars’ be a Rorschach inkblot image…
October 30th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Lh'owon says:
Oops, accidental post, nothing whatsoever to do with testing.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Aquatopia says:
Testing.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Aquatopia says:
Blast.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Lh'owon says:
Heh, in a fit of genius I managed not to select my avatar after uploading. I are clever.
(last post, promise)
October 30th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
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 ¬_¬)
October 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
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…
October 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
arqueturus says:
Death’s head?
October 30th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
arqueturus says:
Heh, great character been years since I thought of him.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Kismet says:
Does it work? Does it? It does.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Solario says:
Testing?
October 30th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
wiper says:
Is I is or is I ain’t visible?
October 30th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Xagarath says:
That Death’s Head avatar is possibly the best I have yet encountered on the internet.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:29 am
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?
October 31st, 2007 at 1:36 am
CrashT says:
Obligatory testing post.
October 31st, 2007 at 7:33 am
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:13 am
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:20 am
Alex Hopkinson says:
You really should have used “Avatars, Yes?” as the topic title!
October 31st, 2007 at 10:40 am
AbyssUK says:
testing - inside out teddy bears make me cry
October 31st, 2007 at 10:41 am
A fine point, Alex. Obscure 80s comicbook references FTW.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:43 am
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:55 am
Tom Edwards says:
The system will occasionally randomly forget to display your gravatar, or spend months trying to load.
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:23 am
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:25 am
KindredPhantom says:
Test.
October 31st, 2007 at 2:49 pm
KindredPhantom says:
..
October 31st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
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…
October 31st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
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.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:04 pm
KindredPhantom says:
Hopefully working.
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 am
Watcher95 says:
Testes..1..2…3?
November 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Watcher95 says:
one more try
November 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Fat Zombie says:
Testing, testing.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Nameykins says:
testing, one two three
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