Auto avatars from nice avatar collection?

[georg]

I am new to discourse and just started a tiny community called frele. From other forum software, I do know an automatic avatar feature.
Means, new users, who do not add a profile pic, will receive a random nice avatar picture from a default collection (not only a boring one with a letter on it).
Is there a plugin or another way setting this up in discourse?
Thanks

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I think a clever way to solve that might be a font for the boring avatar letter that was some kind of avatar. The first trick is finding out making an avatar font.

But last I looked carefully there was either a fixed set of avatars that all users had to use (did you see that option?) or users could use their own avatar.

[georg]

@pfaffman thanks for the helpful answer. Just found the option. So there is only default avatar or loading up own avatar and having the letter avatar as standard?

[keegan (Keegan George)]

@georg There is a site setting you could select called selectable_avatars_enabled which let’s you predefine a list of avatars that users can select from.

If you enable this, users will automatically be assigned a random avatar:

@zogstrip

After enabling the selectable avatars enabled site setting, two things will happen

• Newly created user will automatically be affected a random avatar from the list.
• Users will be presented with the same list to choose from whenever they want to change their avatar.

More information about that feature here:

Selectable avatars

Avatars are a big part of anyone’s online identity. Discourse already supports 3 options when it comes to avatars: based on the first letter of your username, your Gravatar or any images you want to upload. [image] But what if you want to provide your users with a limited set of avatars to choose from? It’s now possible thanks to the “selectable avatars” feature! As an admin, if you click Edit next to the selectable avatars site setting, a modal will pop up and ask you to start uploading avat…

[rmccown (Bob McCown)]

@pfaffman

I think a clever way to solve that might be a font for the boring avatar letter that was some kind of avatar.

This is a nifty idea. There are lots of fonts out there when you search “font with faces.”

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

“Font with faces”!!! I searched for “avatar font” and found an amusing history of the font selection for the movie “Avatar.” That’s when I gave up.

I haven’t looked at the code enough to know if this is a good project for a novice or whether you need to go deep into Rails to do it; I’m afraid it’s the latter.

[georg]

Thank you all! So nice. Think I’ll go with selectable avatars.

[rmccown (Bob McCown)]

I think we’d need to find out where the letter-avatars are created. You’d have to have the font it uses selectable in the admin, and a way to rebake them.

Edit: Found it, lib/letter_avatar.rb

Edit again: If I’m following it correctly, we’d have to add a font to ImageMagick, and then when convert is called, use that font in place of Helvetica in the instructions.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Yeah. It’s more of a sysadmin task than a Discourse one. I still think it’s not a terrible idea, but there might be better ways to solve the problem. (Mine would be to just encourage people to set their own avatar.)

[rmccown (Bob McCown)]

It would be nice for members to have some kind of “If you don’t have one of your own, pick from one of these…” option.