# Users profile image not showing (letter avatars)
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [February 15, 2019, 9:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224 "2019-02-15T09:17:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@dave\_odiakaose](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dave_odiakaose)
#### Post date: [February 15, 2019, 9:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/1 "2019-02-15T09:17:49Z")
hello im having trouble with users default profile image not showing. Admin
 profile image shows but not users. how can i fix this ?
---
### Author:  [@gerhard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gerhard)
#### Post date: [February 15, 2019, 11:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/21 "2019-02-15T11:03:25Z")
Please run:
```plaintext
cd /var/discourse
git pull
./launcher rebuild app
```
Our previous letter avatar system would cache IP addresses for the CDN, this IP changed. We fixed the offending code and back ported to beta and stable.
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2019, 3:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/29 "2019-02-18T03:03:00Z")
> [@SystemZ](#):
>
> To prevent this issue in the future, just turn off “external system avatars enabled” in Discourse settings.
> This fixed issue for me even without restarting.
> [@konklone](#):
>
> Turning off the CDN option altogether means avatars themselves are pulled down from their self-hosted URLs and not proxied to the CDN host at all, which is another way of resolving the problem (at some potential performance cost).
Per:
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/f04471e4229218903df17232db955cd583a423ef](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/f04471e4229218903df17232db955cd583a423ef)
The root cause is sorted, we can move our CDN as much as we want and letter avatars will continue to work.
Originally there was a proposal to modify our NGINX config here to amend the resolver by @Matt_Campbell [Configure the nginx resolver to eliminate name resolution on startup by mwcampbell · Pull Request #413 · discourse/discourse\_docker · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker/pull/413) however I was worried a lot about amendments to NGINX.
New design uses Ruby to do the proxying of the images (which are super aggressively cached) so the actual functionality is unchanged except that NGINX no longer does the caching so IP caching of CDN is gone.
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2019, 10:24pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/30 "2019-02-18T22:24:31Z")
---
### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2019, 10:40am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/31 "2019-02-19T10:40:08Z")
This seems to remove the ability to plug in external avatar providers like described [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-letter-avatar-rendering/33082/34) since it now [hardcodes](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/f04471e4229218903df17232db955cd583a423ef/app/controllers/user_avatars_controller.rb#L47)`avatars.discourse.org` ?
---
### Author:  [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2019, 10:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/32 "2019-02-19T10:44:08Z")
You can still use external avatar providers. All we did was move the proxy from the nginx config ([where it was previously hardcoded to avatars.discourse.org](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/56820a5fa5a1795034d0524a6d31ee09d249bff5/config/nginx.sample.conf#L237)) to the rails app.
Other external avatar providers do not get proxied - avatars will be loaded directly from whatever service you choose. For example, on our hosting, we link all letter avatars directly to [avatars.discourse.org](http://avatars.discourse.org), without a proxy.
---
### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2019, 12:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/33 "2019-02-19T12:44:36Z")
I get it now, thanks for explaining!
---
### Author:  [@gerhard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gerhard)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 4:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/38 "2019-02-26T16:39:59Z")
4 posts were split to a new topic: [Apple touch icon causes mixed content warning](https://meta.discourse.org/t/apple-touch-icon-causes-mixed-content-warning/110133)
---
### Author:  [@Mundobizarro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mundobizarro)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2019, 8:33am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/39 "2019-02-27T08:33:31Z")
Hey,
I also have the same issue here, images of some of the respondants are not showing up.
How does this fix work?
cd /var/discourse
git pull
./launcher rebuild app
What should i do exactly?
Thanks in advance
Luuk
---
### Author:  [@TheBestPessimist](https://meta.discourse.org/u/TheBestPessimist)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2019, 10:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/40 "2019-02-27T10:26:53Z")
> [@Mundobizarro](#):
>
> How does this fix work?
Just run those commands from ssh on your server.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2019, 10:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/users-profile-image-not-showing-letter-avatars/109224/41 "2019-03-29T10:26:53Z")
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