Allow polling avatar from URI

[rokejulianlockhart (Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart)]

This appears to already be possible in a corporate environment

SSO & external avatars

When using SSO with sso overrides avatar: true, Discourse seems to download the avatar and always serve it locally instead of linking directly to the URL provided. Would it make more sense to allow avatars to serve directly from the avatar_url provided? As is, for each avatar shown it hits Discourse backend somewhat needlessly. Perhaps this could be a SSO option? If the concern is that avatars may go missing, that could be handled with the image onerror event that fallback’s src to the locally…

but I see no reason why it should be limited to SSO.

---

It’s a great solution to the problems that arise when using a different e-mail address for each service.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gravatar/comments/15ffy6v/gravatar_should_enforce_or_at_least_allow_regex/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[rokejulianlockhart (Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart)]

The code already appears to exist for Discourse

https://gist.github.com/paydro/557c5d2fe75e466c3b20

but more importantly, this is implemented elsewhere, and Gravatar and Libravatar explicitly support it well.

For instance, here’s a document I made about Libravatar’s support

https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2590066/raw/main/s0s2gl.txt.md

0. APIs

   • api
   • Libravatar::URL - Make URLs for Libravatars from an email address - metacpan.org

   email = ''.encode('utf-8')
   hash = hashlib.md5(email.strip().lower()).hexdigest()
   print(hash)
   

1. Examples

   • https://seccdn.libravatar.org/avatar/ea13768f2a7107166add55082804a465?s=512
   • http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/ea13768f2a7107166add55082804a465?s=512

[simon]

I’m guessing a bit here, but I think that to keep serving external avatars with SSO and the discourse connect overrides avatar setting, or by adding a URL to the external system avatars url setting, you need to disable the download remote images to local site setting. So what you are wanting to do can be accomplished now, but only by preventing the downloading of all remote images.

But, I think Discourse has the functionality you are looking for with Gravatars. You can disable the automatically download gravatars site setting while keeping the download remote images to local site setting enabled.

Edit: If I am correct about how things work now, the feature you want is to have a new site setting: automatically download external system avatars.

When that setting was disabled, avatars could be served from the external system avatars url without them being downloaded by Discourse.