Hi guys.
I’m having a peculiar “malfunction” - might be not peculiar, a novice here - where avatars assigned by system do not show up in the top-right corner nor in/next to posts authored by the user, yet those avatars do show in summaries, list of posts/topics.
Also I’ve noticed that upon login that profile-icon appears delayed a bit, in comparison to search & chat icons.
Am I missing some obvious setting? Thanks.
AI-generated summary
lejeczek reports an issue where system-assigned avatars are missing in some UI locations (top-right corner, next to posts) but visible in summaries and topic lists. They also note a delayed profile icon on login compared to other icons. RGJ suggests a recent DNS or nginx issue with avatars.discourse.org, which restarting nginx resolved for them. lejeczek observes a 301 redirect in the container logs and questions whether system avatars rely on external Discourse resources or local generation — wondering if partial visibility could stem from the suggested DNS issue. They also ask about debugging and verbose logging [4]. In [5], they describe highly inconsistent avatar behavior across browsers (Firefox, Brave, Chrome) on the same machine — sometimes visible in one browser, missing in another, even within the same page (e.g., avatar visible in /latest but not in post replies, or vice versa). They cleared site data before testing, calling the behavior “freakyyyy!!!” — suggesting the issue may involve browser-specific rendering or caching, or external factors beyond the local Discourse install.
We did see some issues with the central letter avatar service as well, it started around 7 hours ago. Maybe the DNS for avatars.discourse.org changed, nginx does not always pick that up. Restarting nginx resolved the issue.
Within the container I see:
<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
but now I also wonder: I thought, avatars assigned by the system are most basic way to get an avatar - that needs to talk to Discourse’s resource (as external resource) as opposed to being done “locally”?
Would I see avatars in some places but not everywhere - if it was for the reasons you suggest?
Is it possible to debug it, to get more verbose logs for it?
Should these parts, the behaviour, vary with each web browser and… more, a lot more importantly does it depend on external, external to Discourse local installation, factors?
In Firefox I go to user profile and “system-assigned” avatar is missing there, but it’s present in Brave and again missing in Chrome (all from the same one browsing client)
When I go to /latest there user avatar’s miniature is shown in Chromium but is “missing” in Brave and in Firefox.
In Brave I go to a post, under which I see miniature avatar in last reply and in reply itself the avatar is absent, but in Firefox it’s the opposite.
And I cleared site data for the domain in each browser prior to this “testing”.
This is freakyyyy!!!