Change to Libravatar for default user avatars?

By default, the DIscourse software that powers this site uses Gravatar as a source for user pictures (getting the one linked to your email address as provided in the Fedora Account System. Gravatar is provided by open-source company Wordpress, but isn’t open source.

Many Fedora services instead use Libravatar, an open-source service which does the same thing — and even runs in Fedora Infrastructure.

I think we should change to this for Fedora Discussion and Ask Fedora, but it will cause anyone who hasn’t set an avatar here locally to get a new one, which may be surprising. Additionally, new users without a open source / free software background are much less likely to have an avatar set up with Libravatar, so we might want to do something different on each site.

What do you think?

Should we switch to Libravatar on Fedora Discussion?

  • Yes, but only if Ask switches too
  • Yes, even if Ask stays with Gravatar
  • No, as I will explain below

0 voters

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Note that I’ve asked this separately over at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/change-to-libravatar-for-default-user-avatars/70709

I’m not sure if it still does, but at least in the past, libravatar would fall back to gravatar if you didn’t specify one there. :slight_smile:

4 Likes

I love it! I have changed Gravatar to Libravatar on multiple other Discourse sites because it is actually so easy to do. Since we are active users of Libravatar in other Fedora apps in our ecosystem, it makes perfect sense to me to change here.

Plus, if @kevin is right, there won’t be any noticeable change except for people who have set a Libravatar and Gravatar separately. :grinning:

1 Like

Cool. It’s just:

in the settings, right? Anything else?

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I cannot remember why. But in my other Discourse site configs, I have this value for the base URL:

seccdn.libravatar.org

…don’t ask me why. I can’t remember. But I know it works!

Ah, thanks. Looks like that’s what they suggest in the api docs. On the other hand, I think it might not actually practically matter… but better to follow the documented process!

$ host -t a www.libravatar.org
www.libravatar.org is an alias for libravatar.org.
libravatar.org has address 3.237.94.246
$ host -t a seccdn.libravatar.org
seccdn.libravatar.org is an alias for libravatar.org.
libravatar.org has address 3.237.94.246 
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Okay, since feedback was overwhelmingly positive, I don’t see any reason to wait and I’ve implemented this for both Ask and Discuss. Please test!

1 Like

Done. :white_check_mark:

Super cool that Discourse makes it easy to swap in an Open Source alternative here, especially one that is supported in no small part by the Fedora Community. :partying_face:

3 Likes