How and why were peoples avatars changed?

[ludwig]

Ed - Any idea?

[jno]

in theory because Gravatar got its act together. But naomi protested that she was given one she'd never seen before.

[ludwig]

So it was a problem with gravatar which caused them to be changed in the first place?

[starone]

Mine wasn't changed. I have always been a butterfly. Unless it has changed and I didn't notice.

[starone]

No - I'm still there.

[ludwig]

I can't see them. There's some setting on my browser that blocks them, but I don't know what it is. I just find it disturbing that it can happen.

[jno]

I think generally what happened was that people tried to change their own avatars - over the past several weeks - and found that the new ones didn't appear, or appeared only on their profile page and not on question pages. Some did change, many didn't. Some just reverted to jelly people. Sometime this afternoon it seemed to sort itself out. Naomi's was an odd exception (as I understand it she hadn't tried to change hers at all, but it changed anyway, to a rather nice image of a woman at prayer), but she too has now got back the avatar she originally had, and everyone else has got the ones they tried to change to..

The Ed blames Gravatar for all this. I could not possibly comment.

[naomi24]

I found it disturbing too, Ludwig. It was horrible. I've not tried to change my avatar and I've never seen the one that appeared against all my posts yesterday. It isn't on my Gravatar account, and my profile still showed my own chosen avatar.

[ludwig]

It's not funny is it really?. What next, someone at AB decides it'll be a great joke to change the actual text of something someone's said? - maybe a pig avatar for a muslim or a jewish person? 'Hilarious' eh?

They're supposed to be the ones policing the trollish, juvenile and bullying behaviour on here, not joining in for a laugh.

[naomi24]

Ludwig, no, it isn't funny at all. Images like that do not strike me as 'rather nice', as jno would have it. I actually find them sickeningly revolting. If the same happened to a person of religion, cries of 'outrage' and 'offence' would be coming in from all quarters - but of course, it would never happen.

[AB Editor]

Gravatar had some problems with it's cache on it's severs. It was too "sticky" and remembered the "old" avatars - it was guessing what avatars you should have based on it's memory of them.

To wake it up we added a "parameter buster" (added a string to the end of the url which "called" to gravatar). This made gravtar think it was a "fresh" call and actually had to go "look up" the image, rather than guess it by memory.


New:

http://www.gravatar.c...&r=g&abrs4=2011121416

Old:

http://www.gravatar.c...D35572707&size=64&r=g

As you can see we've added the date/hour on the end of the url to ensure it's woken up every hour.

The issue still lies with Gravatar and is causing problems on other site, this is a hack to get around it.

All the best,

Ed

[ABerrant]

You're welcome, Ed.

[ludwig]

So why would someone get an image that was never on their gravatar account?

[bobthefisherman]

I had a bit of trouble changing mine this afternoon, but sorted it out fairly simply by logging out of both Gravatar and AB, logging back into Gravatar, then selecting the image I wanted again (even though it already had it as my preference), then logging back into AB.....
I quite impressed myself - I'm usually useless at that kind of thing.....
bob.

[fliptheswitch]

As ED says, the problem lies with Gravatar. I emailed them a short while back, they replied to say they were "having difficulties".

All seems ok now, on AB... so problem solved.

[naomi24]

Good question Ludwig.

[netibiza]

Gravatar never answered any of my emails.

[AB Editor]

Sorry, I did mean to say. ABerrant offered this solution to us very kindly. The techies claim to have already thought of it, I'll leave it to you as whether to believe them :)

[AB Editor]

"So why would someone get an image that was never on their gravatar
account?"

No idea, crossed wires with Gravatar?

As I've said before, we just show what they send - if they;ve got confused, we look confused.

But then, we look confused all the time.

Merry Christmas!

[bibblebub]

Ed - I apologise for when I have previously accused AB of probably being responsible for the problem.

[naomi24]

Why then didn't the 'new' one show on my profile as well as by my posts?