It is a rather massive change to the way Discourse deals with avatars. We no longer include direct links to gravatar, so for example, this is no longer a concern on Discourse.
Turns out our docker image is running an old version of image magick, will update the base image in the next week or so, but in the mean time I adjusted my usage. Deploying shortly.
Looks much cleaner, but shouldn’t HTML/CSS or SVG have been used instead of creating images for every user?
I think using SVG would have saved much storage space and added more flexibility to avatar creation.
One zero storage example I can think of is where colors are randomly selected taking user’s username as seed in a RNG, and then extracting the user’s name’s first letter from the DB (shouldn’t be expensive since names are already displayed wherever there are avatars), and then inserting it in a SVG template.
Since SVG images can also be cached, this shouldn’t put much load on servers, while saving precious storage space and adding flexibility to change all avatars in one go if need be.
I love the fact that on an active forum without many custom avatars (like Soylent), the topic listing has a very real chance of spelling out rude words. This makes me giggle with childish glee
There’s even some abuse potential for creative miscreants, and there’s currently no tool to fix this short of removing inoffensive, on-topic posts for no reason other then that the users’ default avatars “just so happened” to spell out some four letter word…
This is so theoretical. And posting in the topic will mess up the order, as posters get promoted to “most frequent” status and last poster changes all the time.
It’s also trivial to rename users in about 3 clicks if they insist on doing this.
I appreciate the concern, but it’s imagineering a bit.
Yeah, I guess I’ve just had too many bad experiences with forums full of 14 year olds… good thing that my WoW days are far, far behind me, altho it sticks to you… it really does.
I think the current extra-mega-bold font is not a good idea. It is very readable (and definitely better than Gravatar for many technical and visual reasons), but veers too far on the side of being large, so to my eye it looks childish and whimsical :
After spending a couple of days getting used to this change, I still feel like the letter-avatars could look better. IMO most of the early mockups looked better than what we have currently. I think it’s that little bit of border that doesn’t feel right.
Border:
No border:
(Using PT Mono. Dunno if that’s the font in use but it seemed pretty close).
I really like the border and am a die hard fan of helvetica, but also think we should probably make this stuff pluggable, so you can have your own fonts and algorithm for your own site.
+1000 to making it pluggable. Was just about to make a post about it. There is huge potential for bikeshed discussion here, for which ‘user’s choice’ is often a great remedy. I’d absolutely love a simple Avatars Customizer plugin that works in similar fashion to the new themer system.
Just changing up the avatar styling can go a long way to personalising your forum and making it feel less “mass produced”.
