Forum avatar problems

I think maybe someone should submit a bug to the creators of the forum software.

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I have been looking yes but discourse wants to cache the image and has been denied access by its own rules. So gravatar can’t work because the cached image is the same as your old avatar. If we somehow ignore the no images allowed rule we would be in the same situation as before anyway. I’m not sure this can be solved.

Maybe it should be relying on gravatars cache instead. I don’t know how gravatar would feel about that as a general rule over the discourse base.

We want free energy. It’s a tricky one.

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So, to summarize: “Old” members of the forum won’t be able to change their profile picture forever?

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I’m going to say no because I don’t think it’s an acceptable conclusion. It is a bug per-se. I can’t submit a bug report without an acceptable solution or in depth review of the problem, though.

The rules state no images allowed. We do not want images. We have no room. But we want avatars. I’m quite certain we can’t just pull it from gravatar because every American morning their servers will die from avatar cache requests. We should cache them ourselves. The traffic then becomes balanced. Thats how it should be.

We need more room, really… I’m struggling for a solution right now.

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It’s stupid that the forum won’t let us cache gravatar images because we don’t let users upload stuff.

Can we just remove the upload capability through the user interface and then turn image uploads back on?

that would solve two problems, actually.

  1. it means users could change their avatars
  2. it means people stop complaining about uploads failing… since they won’t be able to try in the first place.

Gonna check that.

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The problem is that if the image upload endpoint is open then an image can be uploaded. The only difference from avatar to background to attachment is the GUI provided. The id/ref is stored and called. There is no way to differentiate between the purposes of them.

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there is a “sso overrides avatar” which will use the user’s sso avatar from the logging payload… meaning that if a user logs in with his google/facebook/github login he’ll have the avatar from this website…
Won’t solve the issue for the users that have a jme discourse user account though…

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I know of 2 forums that do use gravatar directly and it doesn’t seem to be that big of a problem. (ftb forum and powdertoy forums)

The ftb forum is using Xenforo, so unless the gravatar thing is custom I would suspect that there are a lot more sites directly using gravatar, and so far I never saw a problem on that forum caused by that.

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Let Gravatar worry about their end and just directly link the images - problem solved, 5 minute job.

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As a whole - modifying the discourse base - it isn’t ideal - and very doubtful that it would be an accepted proposition.

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Seems the recommended way is to do this

tl;dr : allow uploads, but set the max image dimension to 128 x 128…

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Works out at about 50,000 avatars per GB. Good enough :slight_smile:

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That’s totally dumb…
You actually can’t set this limit.
Only limit you have is limiting the thumbnail size, which we really don’t care, or limiting the file size in kb.

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ok…limited the file size to 50kb… we’ll see.
Please check if it fixes the avatar thingy

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  1. Trying to upload 20 kb profile jpeg image → fails with error “limit is 50 kb”.

  2. Trying to switch to Gravatar which correctly displays my image on the Gravatar site → getting a default generated “character image”, not the Gravatar image.

Fail on both accounts :disappointed_relieved:

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yeah that works :slight_smile:

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Gravatar doesn’t seem to work for me, but uploading a picture does.

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That will be good enough then…

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I get the same error as @Pilvinen even though I tried to upload a picture with about 30 KB.

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